Author: Grattan, Thomas Colley
Biography:
GRATTAN, Thomas Colley (1791-1864: ODNB)
He was a younger son of Colley Grattan, a solicitor, and his wife Elizabeth Warren; they had married at St. Bride’s, Dublin, Ireland, on 7 Dec. 1783. Thomas Colley Grattan was related to the Irish parliamentarian Henry Grattan and, through his mother, to the Duke of Wellington. He was born in Dublin in 1791 but the family soon moved to Clayton Park, near Castle Carberry in County Kildare. When Clayton Park was destroyed in the 1798 rebellion, they moved again, to the village of Athy in the same county. Grattan was educated in Athy by a clergyman before being sent to Dublin to study law. He abandoned his legal studies to join the Louth militia and served in Ireland and in the north of England. In 1817 he was sailing from Gravesend to Bordeaux, France, on his way to join the South American revolutionaries, when he met Eliza Sarah O’Donnel (1786-1870). They married and their first of four children, Edmund, was born at Bordeaux on 11 June 1818. The family settled in Paris where Grattan was a journalist, contributing articles to British journals and, briefly, publishing the Paris Monthly Review (1822-23). He wrote collections of stories published as Highways and Byways in 1823. 1825, and 1827, but a production of his Ben Nazir with Edmund Kean at Drury Lane in 1827 was a disaster. He moved to Belgium and the Netherlands and found better success writing fiction, publishing Traits of Nature (1829), The Heiress of Bruges (1830), Jacqueline of Holland (1831), Legends of the Rhine (1832), and Agnes de Mansfeldt (1835). In Brussels he met King Leopold and with his help was appointed British Consul to Boston where he assisted in settling the boundary dispute between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada; he wrote The Boundary Question (1842) about the dispute. In 1846 Grattan resigned the consulship in favour of his son, Edmund, and returned to England where he published Civilized America (1851), England and the Disrupted States of America (1861), and a memoir, Beaten Paths, and Those Who Trod Them (1862). Grattan predeceased his wife and died at home at 117 Jermyn Street, London, on 4 July 1864. He was buried on 9 July in the Kensal Green cemetery where Eliza was also interred after her death. (ODNB 15 Nov. 2024; DIB 15 Nov. 2024; Dublin University Magazine 42 [1853], 658-65; ancestry.co.uk 15 Nov. 2024)