Author: Long, Charles Edward
Biography:
LONG, Charles Edward (1796-1861: ODNB)
He was born on 26 July 1796 at Benham Park, Berkshire, the eldest child of Charles Beckford Long (1771-1836) of Langley Hall, Berkshire, and Frances Monro Tucker (1773-1813), daughter of Lucius Tucker, who had married at St. Marylebone in 1795. His grandfather was Edward Long (1734-1813), Judge of the Admiralty Court in Jamaica, plantation- and slave-owner, and author of a History of Jamaica (1774). His father and father-in-law owned the Longville Park and Lucky Valley estates in Jamaica, with several hundred slaves. On emancipation in 1835, his father received compensation of almost £4,000. Long was educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge (matric. 1815, BA 1819, MA 1822). He won the Chancellor’s English Medal in 1818 for his poem, Imperial and Papal Rome. Thereafter, being independently wealthy, he pursued antiquarian and genealogical interests, producing (with Sir Charles George Young) Royal Descents (1845), and depositing his “Genealogical Collections of Jamaica Families” and related documents in the British Museum (BL, Add. Ms 27968). He retained an interest in Harrow and contributed to the headmaster George Butler’s Harrow: A Selection of Lists of the School (1849). He also edited Richard Symonds’s Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army during the Great Civil War (1859). Two short pamphlets were influential and well-regarded: Considerations on the Game Laws (1824) and Negro emancipation no philanthropy (1830), a well-written and even-handed attack on virtue-signalling philanthropy and the hypocrisy of trade. (The attribution in Halkett and Laing is confirmed by a presentation copy in Goldsmiths’ Library, University of London.) He died on 25 Sept. 1861 at the Lord Warden Hotel, Dover, on his return from Hamburg. He was buried at St. Lawrence, Seale, Surrey, where there is still a grave, and left an estate of £10,000 to his nephews. He never married. (ODNB 18 Jan. 2024; Boase 2: 483; ancestry.co.uk 18 Jan. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 18 Jan. 2024; LBS: various family entries; MH 13 June 1818; GM Nov. 1861, 568-9; Dover Telegraph 28 Sept. 1861) AA