Author: McTaggart, Ann
Biography:
MCTAGGART, Ann, formerly HAMILTON (1753-1834: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 26 May 1753 and baptised on 25 June at St. Anne Soho, the eldest child of William Hamilton, an Edinburgh graduate and later a frigate commander in the West Indies, and his wife Sophia Baillie, who had married at St. Alfrege, Greenwich, on 16 Feb. 1752. The family moved to Hotwells, Bristol, around 1761, where Ann and her younger sister Sophia attended school. On the death of her mother in Nov. 1763, her father placed his children in his brothers’ families. After the death of her aunt, she became her uncle’s housekeeper in Exeter and seems to have been on good terms with the literary circle of William Jackson, Hugh Downman, and Richard Polwhele (qq.v.). She moved to London in the 1780s when her uncle remarried. She visited France with her father 1788-9, where she was hostile to the French Revolution and “the bloody doctrines of democracy.” She admired but disapproved of Mary Wollstonecraft and noted of her own youth, “We had not then [1770] advanced so far in the march of intellect or got up so high in the school of philosophy, as to think the property of others fair game, when a golden opportunity offered” (Memoirs 1: 31-2, 63, 2: 251). A School for Mothers or the Search after Perfection, written in the 1790s and commented upon by Coleridge (q.v.) (Memoirs 2: 252-255), also sided with Hannah More (q.v.) against Wollstonecraft. She married James McTaggart, widower, a Bristol wholesale linen merchant and friend of her father’s whom she had known for thirty years, on 12 Feb. 1800 at Old Cleeve, Somerset. There was no issue. Earlier McTaggart (and her uncle David Hamilton) had been masters of slave-ships, mostly to Antigua, and were later Bristol agents, with Hamilton chartering 28 vessels (1766-78) and McTaggart 14 (1771-87). Most of her plays in verse were rejected for the stage but published in The New British Theatre (1814) and four of them were collected in her Plays (1832). Memoirs of a Gentlewoman of the Old School (1830) closes on her marriage and little is known of her subsequent life. Her husband died in Dec. 1805, aged 75. She died at Union Street, Bath, on 14 Dec. 1834, and was buried in Bath Abbey. (ancestry.co.uk 10 Jun. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 10 Jun. 2021; McTaggart, Memoirs [1830]; Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua [1894-9] 2: 50-1; David Richardson, The Bristol Slave Traders [1985] 20, 29-30) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. A. McTaggart
- Mrs. A. M'Taggart