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Author: Logan, Maria

Biography:

LOGAN, Maria (1759-95: ancestry.co.uk)

She was baptised 9 March 1759 at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the daughter of David Logan and his wife Justina Maurice. According to Catherine Cappe, who was on good terms with her mother, David Logan had gone out to Antigua with the aim of establishing a storehouse on the island but had been captured by the French and imprisoned for nine months. He returned to England destitute and faced bankruptcy. He therefore returned to Antigua and became an overseer (slave-manager) on an estate for Colonel Samuel Martin. While he was away, Maria and her mother lived near Catherine Cappe’s family at Catterick, Yorkshire. Cappe taught the young Maria Logan to recite poetry and was struck by her facility and memory.  At some point in the early 1770s, Justina and Maria sailed to Antigua to join David Logan. Maria caught “country-fever,” barely survived, was in ill-health thereafter, and probably became addicted to opium. Her father eventually became Collector of Customs but died at Parham in 1774, leaving his family destitute. They returned to England with Justina’s brother John, a naval officer, providing support. Cappe recounted her final years in York where once again they lived near her. Confined to her bed for seven years, Maria eventually died in her mother’s house on Sunday, 29 November 1795. Cappe’s daughters brought her books and attended her in the final weeks of her illness. Cappe had earlier probably been active in raising Unitarian subscribers to her volume of poems. Her mother survived her and died in 1807 in Leeds where she had probably gone to live with her son, Maurice, who became a well-known surgeon. (YW; Bath Chronicle 1 Sept. 1774; Ipswich Journal 24 Sept. 1774; Leeds Intelligencer 7 December 1795, 29 June 1807; Cappe, Monthly Magazine 41 [April 1816]; Cappe, Memoirs [1822]; ancestry.co.uk 18 Jul. 2020; findmypast 18 Jul. 2020; NBI;  Samuel Martin, "On the Treatment of Negroes," prefixed to the 5th edn. of his An Essay on Plantership [1773]) AA

 

Books written (2):

York: for the author by Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1793
2nd edn. London/ York/ Leeds: T. Cadell/ J. Todd and Wilson and Co./ J. Binns and J. Robinson, 1793