Author: Hoare, Sarah
Biography:
HOARE, Sarah (1777-1856: ancestry.com)
She was born in Old Broad St., London, on 7 Jul. 1777, the eldest of four children of the wealthy Quaker banker Samuel Hoare (1751-1825) and his first wife Sarah Gurney (1757-83). Her mother died after the birth of her last child; in 1788 her father married Hannah Sterry (1769-1856). Sarah Hoare never married but, like other members of the family, pursued her personal interests in art and science and was an active philanthropist. She became an accomplished artist, as the illustrations for her Poems on Conchology demonstrate. In 1790, on medical advice, for Samuel’s sake, the family moved out of London to Hampstead Heath; Heath House was their home for the rest of their lives. Sarah took a special interest in the education of women, sponsoring a school for poor girls on East Lane, Hampstead; her aunt Grizell, with her second husband William Allen, founded the longer-lasting Newington Academy for Girls in 1824. Samuel Hoare had been a founding member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and his circle of friends included prominent Dissenters and Evangelicals such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and Amelia Opie (qq.v.). About 1813 Sarah asked her father’s permission to become a member of the Church of England; he asked her to wait for a year and it is not clear whether she pursued this desire or not. There is no apparent record of a parish burial. Upon his death in 1825, Sarah began writing “Memoirs” about him in a notebook which was eventually published in 1911. She and her stepmother stayed on at Heath House, both giving slightly inaccurate birthdates in the 1851 Census (1781 and 1771 respectively) and both died at Heath House in 1856, Hannah on 21 Jan. and Sarah on 22 Oct. The Sarah Hoare who died at Bath in 1855 was a different person. (ancestry.com 24 Aug. 2022; findmypast.com 24 Aug. 2022; F. R. Pryor, ed., Memoirs of Samuel Hoare by his Daughter Sarah and his Widow Hannah [1911]; Darton; John Bull 26 Jan. 1856; Globe 22 Oct. 1856) HJ