Author: ELLIOTT, Charlotte
Biography:
ELLIOTT, Charlotte (1789-1871: ODNB)
The third daughter of Charles Elliott (1751-1832), a silk merchant with premises in London’s Bond Street, and his second wife Eling Venn (1758-1843), daughter of Henry Venn, she was born on 18 Mar. 1789 at Grove House, Clapham. Her uncle, the Rev. John Venn, was the vicar of Clapham and she was related to Leslie Stephen. A memoir of Charlotte, written by her younger sister Eleanor Babington, stresses that she was an invalid for much of her life and she became permanently weak after an illness in 1821. On 9 May 1822 she met César Malan, a minister from the Swiss reformed church, and this was a turning point after which she became increasingly religious and, according to her sister, gave up reading anything other than Holy Scripture. The family moved to Brighton in 1823 and in the same year she spent several months in Normandy with two of her sisters and a brother, the Rev. Henry Venn Elliott (editor of Psalms and Hymns, 1835). In 1834 she met the Dublin-born philanthropist and intellectual Harriett Kiernan (1786-1835) who was in England seeking treatment for tuberculosis. Kiernan included Elliott’s hymns in her Invalid’s Hymn Book and the two women probably worked together to compile and edit both the 1834 and 1835 editions. (A later edition from 1841 has more of Elliott’s hymns, including "Just as I am.") Elliott took over from Kiernan as the editor of the Christian Remembrancer Pocket Book, a position she held from 1834 to 1859. She lived with her sister Eleanor and Eleanor's clergyman husband in Torquay until 1857 when they moved back to Brighton. The 1871 Census shows them living at 10 Norfolk Terrace. She died there on 22 Sept. 1871 and was buried in the family vault at St. Andrew’s church. Best remembered for her hymns, Elliott published Hours of Sorrow Cheered and Comforted (1836), and Hymns for a Week (1839, 1842) which reportedly sold 40,000 copies. After Charlotte's death Eleanor edited Selections from the Poems of Charlotte Elliott (1873), and Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters, and Poems of Charlotte Elliott (1874). No confirmation has yet been found, but Charlotte Elliott may have been the “Miss Elliot” (q.v.) who published Fancy’s Wreath in 1812. (ODNB 4 Apr. 2025; ancestry.co.uk 4 Apr. 2025; Eleanor Babington, ed. Selections from the Poems of Charlotte Elliott [1873]) SR