Author: Maddocks, Mrs.
Biography:
MADDOCKS, Mrs. (fl 1820-30)
The best available evidence about Mrs. Maddocks comes from her publications, particularly from the prefaces to them which recommend the books on charitable, moral, and literary grounds. (The tenor of all these prefaces is the same, and reviews identify the writer of at least some of them as the missionary Dr. Ebenezer Henderson [1784-1858].) She was a very poor widow when she took the ms of her first book to the Rev. T. James, the minister of the independent City Chapel, London, where she worshipped. That was Scripture Female Portraits (1820), written originally for “Miss Eliza C---” who had been in the care of Mrs. Maddocks, and on whose behalf she awoke her “long dormant muse” (p. 3). Evidently Mrs. Maddocks had been taught to write verses and had become an educator herself. By 1827 her situation had deteriorated: she was “poor but pious,” “in the evening of life,” and threatened with the workhouse. On the occasion of the appearance of a second edition of The Female Missionary Advocate (1830), an addition to the preface relays the good news that Mrs. Maddocks has found refuge in Mrs. Westby’s Alms Houses, Hoxton, where she is continuing to write. She signed herself in a letter, quoted in the first book, “A. Maddocks.” At this point certainty ends and speculation takes over. She might be Amelia Maddocks (b c. 1769), who at the time of the 1841 census was (still) living in the east end of London, in Shoreditch, with one servant, not far from John Maddocks, aged 30, a clerk, and his family. And in that case she might be the former Amelia Ody of Richmond who married John Maddocks at St. George’s, Hanover Square, London, in 1808, and he might be the John Maddocks (b 1750) who was buried at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 31 Mar. 1814. But confirmation is wanting, and no convincing death record has been located. (findmypast.com 13 Feb. 2024; ancestry.com 13 Feb. 2024; Congregational Magazine 6 [1830], 497; New Baptist Miscellany 3-4 [1829], 76)