Author: Gomersall, Ann
Biography:
GOMERSALL, Ann, formerly RICHARDSON (1750-1835: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 24 Jan. 1750, probably in the City of London, the daughter of Thomas Richardson, cooper, and his wife Elizabeth Gooch, who had married on 2 June 1745 at St. Katherine by the Tower. She credited her mother with her education but nothing else is known concerning it. She married William Gomersall (1757-1814) on 24 July 1781 at All Hallows by the Tower, City of London. They may not have had any children. At some point they moved to Leeds where he traded as merchant, clothier, and linen-draper, but by 1789 his business suffered under “the late very extensive Commercial Calamities” and they moved to Exeter, Portsmouth, and finally the Isle of Wight. He seems to have become a barrack-master which may explain their movements. After his death in 1814, she rebaptised herself at Saint James Street, Independent, Newport, Isle of Wight, on 28 Feb. 1817--possibly a turn to dissenting beliefs she had encountered in Leeds. She applied to the RLF six times 1818-1834, receiving small amounts of £5-£12. She suffered from ill health and two strokes in 1820 and 1828 rendered her largely blind and paralysed. Thomas Binney, LLD (1798-1874), the dissenting minister at Saint James Street chapel from 1824, supported her applications and liased with Joseph Snow, the secretary of the RLF. She died on 17 June 1835, aged 85, at South Street, Newport, Isle of Wight, and was buried at Church Litten, next to her husband. A death report recorded her as the author of a poem, The Deluge, but it seems likely this is an error. Her novels have attracted attention for their descriptions of Leeds, and its mercantile class with both merchant heroes and thieving petty tradesmen, and the attendant social ills and benefits: Eleanora (1789), The Citizen (1790). Her last novel The Disappointed Heir (1796) describes mercantile life in America and Jamaica. (Orlando 26 Dec. 2022; ancestry.co.uk 26 Dec. 2022; RLF, 1/332; Hampshire Advertiser 20 June 1835; Hampshire Chronicle 22 June 1835; Hampshire Telegraph 22 June 1835; James Raven, Judging New Wealth [1992], 112-37; EN1) AA
Other Names:
- A. Gomersall