Author: Lloyd, Mary Ann
Biography:
LLOYD, Mary Ann (fl 1820-25)
Mary Ann(e) Lloyd began writing to earn small sums of money after the death of an employer: her poems were all self-published and self-sold. Although she is sometimes designated “Mrs.” she was most probably a mature unmarried woman. The contents and the sometimes extensive prose prefaces of her works fortunately contain enough information to piece together her story. From 1805 to 1819 she lived with an invalid, a “gentlewoman,” who advised her to save as much money as she could to provide for herself because she as an annuitant would be unable to leave her anything. After losing the “worthy and afflicted lady, who is now in heaven,” Lloyd hoped that her savings of £420 would allow her to avoid going into service again. Her late mistress had also encouraged her poetry, so she started having short works printed on her own account. Most of them are 2-3 pages long but a few are longer, or padded out with prose apparatus. “Think of Jesus” (1823), dated from “Mr. Young’s, High Street, Lambeth,” contains only six pages of verse. Other addresses of lodgings follow. “Lines on the Death of My Landlord” (1824) is dated from 13, Thomas St., Lambeth, and The Funds (1825) from 13, Little Carter Lane, Doctor’s Commons. The BL contains a small collection of her broadsides of c. 1823 bound together with a printed address to the reader but no collective title-page. A note at the end of it indicates that her lines about the stock market would be printed only if it could be done by subscription—which is apparently what happened. Lloyd was unlucky in her investments, made through brokers whom she names, for better or worse, in the long Preface to The Funds. By trading in foreign bonds, especially in the notorious Poyais fraud of Gregor MacGregor (1786-1845), she was left “without a farthing.” She also complains of subscribers who failed to pay. She is perhaps the Mary Ann Lloyd who was taken into the Marshalsea Prison in 7 June 1825 for a debt of £50. There are no later publications and it is not known what became of her. (findmypast.com 25 Jan. 2024; ancestry.com 25 Jan. 2024; Mary Ann Lloyd, “Poems,” BL 1346.i.41)
Other Names:
- Mrs. M. A. Lloyd