Author: King, Elizabeth Robinson
Biography:
KING, Elizabeth Robinson (1784-1850: ancestry.com)
The "Young Lady" who published her Poems and Reflections by subscription in 1815 was Elizabeth Robinson King "of Croydon." Born and baptised in her father's parish of St. Thomas the Apostle, London, she was the eldest of eight children (all but one of whom survived to maturity) of Isabella (Robinson) and Richard King. Richard King was a London businessman, variously described at the times of bankruptcy in 1789 and 1811 as a broker and as a "Merchant and Underwriter." After he died in 1812 the family moved to Fairfield Lodge in Croydon with the maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Robinson (d 1827, aged 85). They were well connected and 1815 may have been a high-water point for the family's fortunes. The subscription list, 63 pages long with mostly London addresses, is headed by the Duke of Kent, who took six copies. King's mother, grandmother, and three surviving sisters--all living together at the time--subscribed, as did two of her three surviving brothers. In a cool review of King's "pretty" poetry, the Critical Review commented more admiringly on the many "fashionable subscribers" than on the verse. At the time of the Census of 1841, the author and her mother were lodgers in the house of a surgeon in Brighton; there her mother died in 1844. As a single woman of independent means, she moved to Gloucestershire, where she died at St. Chloe, nr. Minchinhampton, of "scirrhus of the stomach" and was buried in nearby Amberley. (ancestry.com 31 May 2021; GM 97:1 [1827] 380; Critical Review 2 [1815] 426-8; contributions from AA) HJ
Other Names:
- Miss E. King