Author: Jones, Lavinia Elizabeth Chapman
Biography:
JONES, Lavinia Elizabeth Chapman, formerly Kemp (1802-1871: ancestry.com)
Born 25 July 1801 at Blackheath, Greenwich, and baptised there on 8 Apr. 1818, she was the youngest of the four daughters of George Kemp (1774-1801), supercargo on the Indiaman Admiral Reinir, and his wife, Sarah (Hawkins) Kemp (1773-1848). Lavinia was named for her paternal grandmother, Mary Chapman (d 1805). Her exceptionally wealthy uncle Walter Hawkins (1787-1862) was a London insurance broker and Russia merchant. On 8 Aug. 1822, the poet married Daniel Jones (1796-1866) at St Nicholas Church, Brighton (not David Jones, as in several sources). She and her husband spent their life together at Bradford-on-Avon where Daniel was a successful architect, builder, and sometime printer. His most notable contract was for a church at Chippenham designed by the Gothic revivalist Sir George Gilbert Scott. He worked as well for architect Thomas Henry Wyatt on a church at Tottenham. Lavinia developed an obsession with the infamous prophet Joanna Southcott (q.v.), undoubtedly because her aunt Lucy and Lucy’s husband, Robert Taylor of Exeter, had been Southcott’s employers. So relentless and determined was she in pursuit of Southcott manuscripts that to obtain them she sometimes resorted to subterfuge and other underhand means. Between 1835 and 1853, she and her husband published Southcottiana in a series of pamphlets ranging in length from four to ninety pages. In the 1861 census, her husband is listed as resident in Bradford living with a 53-year-old female servant; she is listed as a lodger at 61 Charlotte Street, Marylebone, London. In 1871, now a widow, her residence was Bunbury House, Bradford. She died, apparently childless, on 8 Apr. 1879 at 8 Montpellier Crescent, Brighton, where she had been living with her only surviving next of kin, her widowed sister Abigail Edelman. At probate, her estate was valued under £200; her husband’s estate had been valued under £3,000. (ancestry.com 15 Dec. 2023; Sailsbury and Wiltshire Journal, 14 Apr. 1855; Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 6 Dec. 1866; C. Lane, “Life … and Bibliography of Joanna Southcott,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association 44 [1912], 732-809; G. R. Balleine, Past Finding Out [1956], 106-07; F. Brown, Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Prophecies [2003], 95-114) JC