Author: Jackson, Adelaide
Biography:
JACKSON, Adelaide (fl 1826)
The anonymity of this poet is regretful, her obscurity unwarranted. Her 1826 unadvertised volume, Fragments, “by a Lady”, was at the time of its publication entirely unremarked upon; it continues to be. The origin of the attribution in library catalogues to “Adelaide Jackson” is untraced. Worth recording is a contemporary reference to Adelaide Jackson (b 1777) who, in 1843, dissolved her partnership in a school in Robert Street, St Pancras. She and her co-school mistress, Maria Charlotte Questel—her junior by twenty-five years—were born on the island of St Vincent. A widow by 1841, in 1851 she was retired and living in Southampton. In a “Preface,” the poet states that she wrote some of the poems at age fourteen. Many are technically sophisticated and emotionally and psychologically complex. The book’s epitaph from Pope is appropriate to the poems’ matter and manner: “From grave to gay—from lively to severe.” She had been driven to grief and to thoughts of death by slighted friendships and lost loves. (Some of her poems could have been written by Miss Havisham of Great Expectations.) Fickle “Albert” gave his heart and ring to “Maria Moore;” she loved and lost “Frederick,” “William,” and her “soul’s first choice,” “Jessy.” The poet closes the volume with sincere but conventional religious poetry. The poem “To the Rev. T. F. A.” presumably refers to Thomas Francis Atwood (1799-1856), perpetual curate of St Peter, Hammersmith, London. A copy of Fragments offered for sale by a Maryland bookstore is bound with another book, also published by John Cookson Kelly and Son, Path to Naval Fame by Henry Barnet Gascoigne (q.v.). (ancestry.com 1 Nov. 2023; BL catalogue; Ten Pound Island Book Company online 30 Oct. 2023) JC