Author: Garrington, Sarah
Biography:
GARRINGTON, Eliza Sarah (1787-1823: ancestry.co.uk)
Pseudonym Eliza
She was born on 12 Mar. 1787 and baptised on 8 Apr. at St. Mary the Virgin, Burnham on Crouch, Essex, the tenth of twelve children of William Garrington and Mary Hawkins--who had probably married in 1772 but the Burnham marriage registers are missing for the period. From 1803 onwards she suffered “three attacks of Palsy” with the last attack, on 7 Dec. 1819, paralysing her right side and impairing her speech. She recovered but suffered continued ill health until her death on 24 Apr. 1823 at Burnham. Her verse had first appeared in the Baptist Magazine in 1821, possibly encouraged by her elder brother, John Garrington (1775-1857), who had been selected as Baptist minister for Burnham in 1811 and would serve there for forty-four years. He organised the heavily-subscribed collection of her religious and occasional verse listed here, together with a fellow Baptist, William Henry Colyer of nearby Foots Cray. The evangelical verse, with the exception of “Solitary Musings” will have few readers today but the poems to members of her family, topographical verse (“Musings at Midnight on the Banks of the Crouch,” “Remembrance of Rural Walks”), and the female-reader experience poem (“On Reading Miss Smith’s Works” [Elizabeth Smith, q.v.]) are fresher and worth another look. (ancestry.co.uk 6 Apr. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 6 Apr. 2024; Freereg; Essex and Herts Mercury 29 Apr. 1823; New Monthly Magazine June 1823, 285; Essex Record Office, Burnham Registers, St. Mary the Virgin, D/P, 162/1/2) AA