Author: Mallitt, Mary
Biography:
MALLITT, Mary (1780-1804: Short Account)
She was baptised on 1 May 1780 at Lowestoft, the daughter of Thomas Mallitt and Mary Webster, a widow whom he had married on 24 Sept. 1775. Mary Mallitt's mother died in 1782 and she was brought up by her father until she went to boarding-school in Norwich in 1791. Her religious experience and conversion to Methodism followed a familiar pattern of doubt, striving, acceptance of grace, and ecstatic joy: “Here my soul delights to range, and here I am lost in the labyrinths of wonder . . . . I lose sight of earth, and get beyond the aerial regions, till at last my imagination paints to my mind the heavenly Jerusalem – the Celestial City” (Memoir [1806], 347). Despite such enthusiasm and ill-health, she learned some Hebrew and acquired sufficient Greek from the standard lexicons of the day to translate the New Testament. However, her health deteriorated and in the last two years of her life she was clearly suffering from consumption and heart problems. She died on 29 Jan. 1804 and was buried next to her mother on 3 Feb. at St. Margaret’s, Lowestoft. In Oct. 1805 John Riles (1765-1826), a Wesleyan Methodist minister, announced that he was preparing for the press a volume of about 70 pages, The Triumph of Religion Illustrated in the Life and Death of Mary Mallett [sic], of Lowestoft, but it does not seem to have been published. He did, however, print an account of her life with passages from her journal in the Methodist Magazine (1806). Eventually, the narrative of her life, the journal entries, and poems would be overseen and published by another Wesleyan minister, Thomas Tattershall, as A Short Account of the Life and Death of Miss Mary Mallitt (1808). (Mallitt, Short Account [1808]; ancestry.co.uk 12 Apr. 2021; Ipswich Journal 11 Feb. 1804; Eclectic Review Oct. 1805, 795; "Memoir of Miss Mallitt," Methodist Magazine 1806, 199-204, 245-52, 297-302, 345-8, 389-97) AA
Other Names:
- Miss Mary Mallitt