Author: Daniell, Edward
Biography:
DANIELL, Edward (1795-1865: ancestry.co.uk)
Although no baptism record has been traced, in the 1851 and 1861 Censuses he gave his place of birth as Leicester, Leicestershire. Nothing is known of his education. His first publication, The Gaol (1817), recorded his confinement and trial, not for debt, but for murder. While practising as a surgeon in Weldon, Northamptonshire, he had taken a young woman into his house who subsequently became pregnant and gave birth. He tried to get rid of her before and after the birth but she seems to have wanted a settlement of some kind. The baby subsequently died and in the acrimonious dispute which followed, he was accused of the murder and prosecuted but acquitted. He then married Mary Pywell (1800-25), the eldest daughter of a local farmer, on 25 Sept. 1817, at Weldon, and they went on to have five children before her death. He moved to Buckinghamshire, where he married Henrietta Cole (1797-1863) on 5 Apr. 1827 at Emberton; with her he had a further seven children. He subsequently established a medical practice in the High Street, Newport Pagnell, Bucks. He died on 16 June 1865, aged 69, at Stony Stratford, Bucks., leaving an estate of around £6000 to be administered by two of his sons. In addition to the works listed here, he planned to publish “The Four Ages of Man: Infancy, Youth, Manhood, and Age; founded upon a suggestion of the Poet Cowper’s” in 1824, but it does not seem to have been printed. He published an elegy of 9 pages in 1827; two further occasional poems in 1842 and 1860; and a few medical papers. Proposals for Establishing a General Medical Annuity Fund (1845) for disabled doctors, their widows and children, reflected the growing concerns of the professional class for charitable or state intervention. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 22 Apr. 2022; Leicester Chronicle 4 Oct. 1817, 21 Apr. 1827; Northampton Mercury 24 June 1865) AA