Author: Hutton, Mary
Biography:
HUTTON, Mary, formerly TAYLOR (1794-1859: findmypast.co.uk)
She was baptised on 7 July 1794 at All Saints, Wakefield, the daughter of William Taylor and his wife Mary Parry. They had both been in service in London but moved up to Wakefield where he was involved in a canal boat venture which does not appear to have succeeded. They returned to London but at some stage, after her parents’ deaths, she went to Sheffield where she married Michael Hutton, a cutler who was twenty years her senior. The date of the marriage is unknown but it must have been after 1823 when Hutton’s first wife died and before 1828 when John Holland first visited her, possibly at the instigation of the ever-helpful and generous James Montgomery (q.v.). A subscription was organised for her, resulting in Sheffield Manor (1831). Her next volume, The Happy Isle (1836), was also well supported; it contained her scathing attacks on the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834). In 1841 she was living at 35 Cotton Mill Row, Sheffield, with her husband aged 70 and his daughter Mary, aged 35, to whom she was always close. Her final work, Cottage Tales (1842), was more restrained but contains her autobiographical preface and meditations on the fates of Clare and L. E. L. (qq.v.). Her life after this final publication took a dramatic turn. On 18 October 1843, depressed and emaciated, with her husband in the workhouse, she was taken by force “in the pauper dress of degradation, her own clothes having been taken away” to the Asylum at Attercliffe where she was harshly treated. Since Wakefield was her birth parish, she had become a victim of the very Poor Law she had railed against. She was moved to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum but fortunately this was run by a humane and cultured physician, Charles Caesar Corsellis, and his wife Caroline, and after a few days she was employed in knitting in sewing and gradually recovered. She later expressed her gratitude for his gentle treatment in a poem, "To Dr. and Mrs. Corsellis." Her husband died, aged 76, in 1846, and thereafter she lived with her step-daughter Mary. In the 1851 Census she proudly gave her occupation as “Poetess.” She may possibly have attempted suicide in 1854 but the evidence is unclear. She died on 4 May 1859 in Shrewsbury Hospital, Sheffield, aged 64, of senile decay. (findmypast.co.uk 4 Aug. 2020; W. C. Newsam, Poets of Yorkshire [1845] 224; Meagan B. Tinney, Victorian Poetry 49 [2011] 127-146; Sheffield Independent 22 Jan. 1831, 20 Jan. 1844, 9 Mar. 1844, 14 Jan. 1854, 3 Jun. 1854; Leeds Intelligencer 23 Mar. 1844; Sheffield Iris 18 Aug., 20 Oct., 24 Nov. 1835; Sheffield Daily News 12 May 1859; Sheffield Daily Telegraph 12 May 1859; William Hudson, The Life of John Holland [1874], 155-156; Prefaces to the three volumes, 1831, 1836, 1842) AA