Author: KELLY, Thomas Worralla
Biography:
KELLY, Thomas Worralla (1796-1874: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in London, probably in Covent Garden, on 4 Aug. 1796 to John Kelly and his wife Mary Howard, who had married on 29 June 1786. He was baptised at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 14 Aug. 1796. Nothing is known about his education but he became a schoolmaster and in census records for 1861 and 1871 he described himself as a professor of writing. He married Harriet Bridges on 13 July 1826 at Old Church, St. Pancras. They had five children, all of whom predeceased their parents: Harriet (1828-49), Thomas (1830-48), John (1832-35), Mary (1833-52), and Bernard (1835-37). Poems in his Rosemary Leaves (1854) record visits to the graves of his children. The 1841 Census shows the family living in Compton Street, St. Pancras; by 1851 they had moved to Beaumont Street, Marylebone. Harriet died in the summer of 1874 and he died in Nov. of the same year. The children and their parents were all buried in Abney Park cemetery in Hackney, London. Kelly contributed to the annuals and his other publications are A Night Among the Fairies; St. Agnes' Fountain, or the Enshrined Heart; the Peri's Charm; and Other Poems (1842) and Menana; a Romance of the Red Indians, in Ten Cantos (1861). His Rosemary Leaves includes additions by John Ambrose Williams and W. T. Moncrieff, and Myrtle Leaves, listed in this bibliography, is dedicated to Chandos Leigh (qq.v.). (ancestry.co.uk 30 Apr. 2025; O'Donoghue) SR