Author: Dickinson, Eleanor
Biography:
DICKINSON, Eleanor, formerly Blakey (1795-1885: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 4 Dec. 1795 at Whitby, the daughter of John Blakey (1767-1823), a silversmith, and his wife Eleanor Dickinson (1768-1803), both Quakers. She was educated at Ackworth school 1805-1809. She married her first cousin Robert Dickinson, a hatter, on 6 Apr. 1818, at St. Anne’s, Liverpool. They had seven children who were also educated at Ackworth. She and her husband opened Springfield Academy in Liverpool but it does not appear to have prospered. Her brother Robert Blakey probably conformed and was sent out to Canada as a missionary by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1821. He became Rector of St. John’s, Grenville, in Lower Canada and died there in 1858. In March 1833, possibly with a view to joining him, she and her husband and most of the children sailed to New York on the Hibernia. For reasons unknown they must have returned to England by March 1834 when Eleanor was first admitted to the Retreat, York, a well-known Quaker asylum. She was described as a schoolmistress who had gone insane three months earlier. By late 1838, she sat around despondently, reading the Bible and poetry, and could not be left unsupervised because she would eat “leaves, pebbles, dirt & mortar out of the walls” in an effort to drive away evil spirits. She believed she was the Woman in Revelations who shall save the People, attempted suicide, had moments of erotic excitement and frequently used sexual language. Thereafter the annual reports record little change but by 1860 she was described as in an advanced state of dementia. A few years before her death she was still playing the piano, reciting and writing poetry (sometimes incoherently) but had become occasionally violent. She died, of senile decay, on 13 Nov. 1885, at the Friends’ Retreat, York. (Liverpool Mercury 17 Jan. 1823, 16 Jan. 1824, 15 Oct. 1824; John H. Nodal, The Bibliography (Biographical and Topographical) of Ackworth School [1889], 88; Ackworth School Catalogue [1831], 2557-2558; The Retreat Archive York Case Notes [1834-1885] digitalised at wellcomelibrary.org; Annual Monitor 45 [1887], 78) AA