Author: D'Arblay, Alexander Charles Louis
Biography:
D’ARBLAY, Alexander Charles Louis (1794-1837: Sabor)
He was born on 18 Dec. 1794 and baptised on 11 Apr. 1795 at St. Nicholas, Great Bookham, Surrey, the son of Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay (1754-1818), a French artillery officer (later General) living in exile, and Frances Burney (1752-1840), novelist and daughter of Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), who had married in 1793. He was educated at home and from 1802 in Paris, where he won several prizes. He attended his grandfather’s school in Greenwich in 1812 with less success but proceeded to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1813, migrating to Christ’s in 1816 (Scholar 1817, BA 1818, Fellow 1818, MA 1821). He was ordained deacon (1818) and priest (1819). His early promise in mathematics, chess, and poetry was never fulfilled due to idleness and lack of application and he seems to have suffered from the usual range of Romantic pathologies from Wertherism to manic depression. In 1821 with his friends John Herschel (1792-1871) and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) he went to the Swiss Alps where he wrote several poems, including two on Mont Blanc (Mss, Berg Collection, NYPL); his later volume, Urania (1833) also recalled his Alpine experiences. In the 1820s and 1830s he planned a new version of the Psalms in English verse but it never materialised. He also published a number of privately printed sermons. D’Arblay became perpetual curate of All Saints, Camden Town, London (1824-37), a living of £200 a year, but he was frequently in trouble due to absence and poor performance. He moved to Ely Chapel, Holborn, in 1836-7. He died of consumption on 19 Jan. 1837 at his mother’s house on Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, London, and was buried on 28 Jan. at Walcot St. Swithin, Bath, with his age given incorrectly as 41. He never married although at the time of his death he had been engaged to a Mary Ann Smith for two years. (ancestry.co.uk 1 Jan. 2025; findmypast.co.uk 1 Jan. 2025; CCEd 1 Jan. 2025; SJC 9 May 1818; Bath Chronicle 2 Feb. 1837, 23 Jan. 1840; GM Aug. 1793, 766, and Apr. 1837, 439; ODNB 1 Jan. 2025 [Frances Burney]; Peter Sabor, “Creative and Uncreative Gloom,” European Spectator: The Representation and Culture of Depression 1660-1800 [2010], 19-41 and “The Education of Alexander d’Arblay: The Idol of the World” in Tanya M. Caldwell, ed., Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century [2020], 45-75) AA
Other Names:
- A. C. L.