Author: Falconar, Harriet
Biography:
FALCONAR, Harriet, later WALKER (1773-1856: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born in London, the daughter of James Falconar, a Scottish merchant formerly of Nairne (Nairn), and his wife Elizabeth Milner, who had married at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate on 21 May 1764. (A sister, Juliet, probably the third Falconar contributor to Poetical Laurels [1791], was baptised at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 18 Jan. 1766.) With her other sister Maria, she began by publishing poems in the European Magazine 1786-7. There then followed Poems (1788), Poems on Slavery (1788), and Poetical Laurels (1791), the last with a cameo portrait of Maria and Harriet by Richard Cosway. She married John Walker, a Lieutenant in the Navy, on 25 Jan. 1795 at St. Michael Wood Street, City of London. She published a few more poems after her marriage but no more volumes. During the war, her conservatism eclipsed her youthful slavery concerns as she wrote panegyrics to naval and military heroes (Nelson, Abercrombie). She had at least six children. Her son William Sidney Walker (1795-1846) (q.v.) was also a poet, and much of the information we have about Harriet is based on his letters to her (now in CUL) which were reproduced (without addresses) in Moultrie (1852). Her husband was wounded in action and subsequently died at Twickenham in 1811. Admiral Essington and others organised £200 for her through Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund in addition to the naval pension and she continued to live at Montpellier Row, Twickenham (1809-13), before moving to Marylebone, Euston Place, Hampstead, then Turnham Green (1831-4) (at her sister Maria’s son’s). Thereafter she lived with her daughter in Chiswick where they ran a boarding-school (1851 Census) and then in Kensington, where she died on 15 Dec. 1856 at 13 Canning Place, and was buried at Brompton Cemetery. (The grave still exists.) Her son, the gifted but unstable William Sidney Walker, whom she had managed to get through Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, by taking in pupils herself, probably had a nervous breakdown in 1835 following the deaths of his aunt and cousin, and died alone in 1846. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Feb. 2021; J. Moultrie, ed., The Poetical Remains of William Sidney Walker [1852]; CUL, Ms. Add 5942; GM Feb. 1857, 251: ECWP 451-2, 536) AA