Author: Downing, Harriet
Biography:
DOWNING, Harriet, formerly BOURNE, later OLIVER (1778-1845: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised Harriott (sic) Bourne on 12 Aug. 1778 at All Hallows, Tottenham (now North London), the daughter of John Bourne and Frances Shuttleworth, who had been married in 1772 at Melcombe Regis, Dorset, by the bride’s father, the Rev. George Shuttleworth. She married George William Downing (1775-c.1820) on 29 May 1803 at St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East. Her husband was an eccentric vintner and sometime bankrupt who wrote comedies and a tract on the reform of parliament. He died on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope around 1820. She was left with five children. They had earlier been depicted as cherubs in the frontispiece to her Mary: or, Female Friendship (1816). In financial difficulty, she then published--also by subscription--The Child of the Tempest; and Other Poems (1821). (Members of her extended family, Bournes and Toogoods, subscribed to both volumes, as did the painter Benjamin Haydon.) She married Charles Martin Oliver, a merchant, "late of Jamaica," on 4 May 1829, at St. Pancras Old Church. He may also have gone bankrupt shortly after the marriage. She continued to publish as Mrs. Downing, notably two dramatic poems, The Bride of Sicily (1830) and Satan in Love (1840). She published three poems in the Forget-Me-Not annual in 1828-29 and various pieces of prose in Fraser’s and Bentley’s. She died of "apoplexy" on 18 Mar. 1845, at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. (ancestry.co.uk 9 Nov. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 9 Nov. 2020; Orlando; Morning Post 8 May, 30 Sept. 1829; Boyle, p. 83; GM May 1845, 563; Metropolitan Magazine May 1845, 94-96) AA