Author: Ellison, Henry
Biography:
ELLISON, Henry (1811-80: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born 11 Aug. 1811, at Bagilllt, Flintshire, Wales, and baptised 5 Oct. at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Westminster, London, the third illegitimate son of Richard Ellison (1754-1827), of Bagillt, and of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, MP for Lincoln (1796-1812) and Wooton Bassett, Wiltshire (1813-20), and Jane Maxwell (1778-1847) who claimed “remarriage” (after an earlier Scottish ceremony) at the same church on 14 Dec. 1814. Ellison’s first wife, Hannah Jane Cookson, had died in 1810 but by then his eldest son Richard Ellison (1808-81) had been born to Maxwell. He was educated at Westminster (1824-8) and Christchurch, Oxford (matric. 1828) but did not proceed to a degree. He was registered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1833 although he was then travelling in Italy, France, and Germany, and published Mad Moments(1833) at Malta with a preface written at Florence. He later reprinted it several times under this title or as The Poetry of Real Life (1844, 1848, 1851). He married Ellen Wells (1811-57) on 30 Oct. 1847 at St. Stephen’s, Hull. There was no issue. She died on 13 Feb. 1857 at Ryde in the Isle of Wight, aged 45. He remained there until at least 1861 but the 1871 Census records him at 10 Stanford Road, Kensington, London, where he died on 13 Feb. 1880, leaving an estate of around £30,000 to his nephews. He was buried in the family plot at St. Helen’s, Boultham, Lincolnshire. Alexander Grosart, an early editor of Wordsworth, wrote a short life but fuller details only emerged in a 1908 N&Q article. A work widely advertised in 1839, Man and Nature in their Poetical Relations (1839), has never been located and was probably the 1839 re-issue of Mad Moments. He also published Touches on the Harp of Nature (1839) and Stones from the Quarry or Modes of Mind (1875). (Alexander Grosart in Alfred H. Miles, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century: Sacred Moral, and Religious Verse [1897], 10: 261-66; John B. Wainewright, N&Q, 1 Aug. 1908, 95; ancestry.co.uk 14 July 2023; Hull Packet 23 Jan. 1810; Lincolnshire Chronicle 12 Nov. 1847; Hull Advertiser 7 Mar. 1857) AA