Author: Gilding, Elizabeth
Biography:
GILDING, Elizabeth, later TURNER (1752-86: ancestry.co.uk)
She was probably born 8 Jan. 1752 and baptised three days later at St. Mary Magdalene, Greenwich, the daughter of John and Mary Gilding. She lost her parents early and seems never to have left the Woolwich area. She may have married the Rev. Daniel Turner twice, once in Jan. 1776 (probably in Woolwich) and then at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, in June. (This was rare but by no means unknown, particularly among Dissenters who regularised their marriages in the Established Church.) They had at least seven children, four of whom survived her death. He had been educated at Glasgow, was minister at Lowestoft, Suffolk, and then moved to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Woolwich. She published Breathings of Genius (1776), contributed forty poems to the Westminster Magazine, and in 1784 addressed two poems to Helen Maria Williams and Charlotte Smith. She died on 21 Feb. 1786. After her death, her husband printed a number of her poems in his funeral meditation Sacred Friendship (1786). It contains her moving responses to the deaths of some of her children. Her husband died in 1796. (ancestry.co.uk 6 Aug. 2020; Orlando; W. Innes Addison, The Matriculation Albums of the University of Glasgow from 1728 to 1858 [1928] 60; Reading Mercury 22 Jan. 1776; New Lady’s Magazine Mar. 1786, 112 and Nov. 1796, 528; Kentish Gazette 28 Feb. 1786; Scots Magazine 1 Nov. 1796) AA
Other Names:
- Eliza Turner