Author: Cope, Harriett
Biography:
COPE, Harriet (1792-1841?: ancestry.co.uk)
Likely she was the “Harriott” Cope who was born to Michael and Ann (Middleton) Cope on 25 Feb. 1792 and baptised at St. Marylebone, London, on 19 Mar. Her father was baptised in the Roman Catholic Sardinian Embassy chapel in Holborn, London, in 1762. He married Ann Middleton in St. Anne’s church, Soho, in 1787. Harriett Cope (in letters she spelled her name Harriett but on title pages it appears as Harriet) had at least one sister. The first edition of Cope’s Triumph of Religion met with some success although the Eclectic Review urged her to a more concise style. Concision is not a hallmark of her letters to the RLF which date from 1821 to 1840 and document Cope’s many difficulties, including with printers and publishers who, she claimed, overcharged her. In writing to the RLF about her, W. T. Fitzgerald (q.v.) wondered if “her head is not quite right.” Cope’s letter of 15 Jan. 1823, written when she was “illegally” confined in the Marshalsea prison for debt to the printer A. J. Valpy, reports on conspiracies to confine her to a madhouse. A year later she wrote about unfair dealings from the publisher J. Hatchard in Piccadilly; her file contains Hatchard’s letter to her stating that not a single copy of Cope’s Waterloo had been sold. The RLF granted her a total of £90 with the last payment of £5 being made in 1839. In 1840 Cope, writing from an address in Chalton Street, London, petitioned again for assistance but was denied on the grounds of the fund’s new regulations which made her ineligible. A note on that letter states that nothing more was heard from her. This may be because she had died: the death of a Harriet Cope in Marylebone was recorded in 1841; it is, however, uncertain that this was her. (ancestry.co.uk 2 Feb. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 2 Feb. 2024; RLF file 454; Eclectic Review 7 [1811], 338) SR
Other Names:
- Miss Harriet Cope
- Harriet Cope