Author: Matthews, Elizabeth
Biography:
MATTHEWS, Elizabeth (1794-1870: findmypast.com)
She was born in Histon, Cambridgeshire, and baptised on 6 July 1774, the daughter of a local landowner, Richard Matthews (d c. 1810), and his wife Frances King, who had been married at Histon on 29 May 1793. The family were Wesleyan Methodist converts who established a preacher and later a chapel in the village. In 1828, after their only other child, Richard Matthews (q.v.), had moved to London to study law at the Middle Temple, his widowed mother and his sister joined him. They worshipped at the newly opened (1827) Liverpool Road chapel, Islington; Elizabeth attended a service there on the last day of her life. She established a girls’ boarding school at Barnsbury Park, Islington, where she remained, unmarried, for the rest of her life. Among the friends who visited and enjoyed her conversation were James Montgomery, Alaric Watts, and Mary Howitt (qq.v.). Her mother died in 1846. The BL copy of Original Hymns includes an advertisement for the “delightfully situated” school and its curriculum “such as long experience has shown to be most successful.” The school seems to have done fairly well: in 1851 it had 12 boarders and it carried on after the death of Elizabeth Matthews on 29 Aug. 1870. At that date the building seems to have been known as Histon House and her home (probably her brother’s formerly) as 6, Belitha Villas, Barnsbury. Like her brother before her, she was buried at Highgate Cemetery. There is no other known published work but she left a spiritual diary, current whereabouts unknown. (findmypast.com 16 Apr. 2023; “Histon: Nonconformity,” british-history.ac.uk; Norwich Mercury 3 Sept. 1870; Elijah Hoole, “The Departure of the Soul from the Body,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 16 [Nov. 1870], 1052-4)