Author: Lawrence, Rose
Biography:
LAWRENCE, Rose, formerly D'AGUILAR (1777-1857: ancestry.co.uk)
She was the daughter of Solomon D'Aguilar (1752-1817), a Liverpool bead merchant, and Margaret Gillmer (1753-1829). The D’Aguilar household at Great George Square was regarded as one of the most cultivated in Liverpool and her mother, Margaret D’Aguilar, was a celebrated beauty in old age. There is no birth or baptism record. Several sources, without evidence, give 1780, Ireland. Other sources based on the 1851 Census give Orleans, France, 1781. However, she was of full age at her marriage in 1800 (indicating a birth of 1779 or before) and her registration at death gives her age as 80 (giving 1777 or 1778 if the tradition of 80th year was followed). She married Charles Lawrence on 29 Oct. 1800 at Childwall, Liverpool. His family had extensive estates in Jamaica and he shared £3500 compensation with his mother for loss of slaves and the Fairfield Estate on abolition. He became Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1823-24 and Chairman of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway from 1830. They moved to Wavertree and then to Mossley Hill where he died 20 Jan. 1853, leaving an estate valued at £70,000. They had three sons who all survived into adulthood. Prior to her marriage, she published anonymously a translation of Goethe, Gortz of Berlingen (sic, 1799) which appeared shortly after Walter Scott’s Goetz of Berlichingen (1799). She then produced a series of anthologies, The Poetical Primer (1817), Cameos of the Antique (1831), and Pictures, Scriptural and Historical (1831), the last two being "elegant extracts" on mythological and biblical themes. She published her own, mostly undistinguished, poetry, in The Last Autumn (1828), to which she added "Recollections of Mrs. Hemans [q.v.]" in 1836. She died at Mossley Hill on 13 Mar. 1857, “the last of a society that in early days, numbered among its most distinguished members in Liverpool – W. Roscoe, Dr. Currie, W. Shepherd, and Mrs. Hemans” (Eton and Windsor Express). (ancestry.co.uk 19 Sept. 2020; LBS; Elizabeth Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, R.A., Sculptor [1870], 35; Lancaster Gazette 1 Nov. 1817; London Courier 6 June 1829; Liverpool Daily Post 16 Mar. 1857; Eton and Windsor Express 21 Mar. 1857; Liverpool Mail 29 Dec. 1849, 22 Jan. 1853; Lady’s Magazine Nov. 1800, 623) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Lawrence