Author: Nooth, Charlotte
Biography:
NOOTH, Charlotte (1784- c 1875: findmypast.com)
The daughter of Elizabeth (Brindley) and James Nooth who had married in Somerset in 1782, she was born in Dorchester, Dorset, and baptised there at St. Peter’s on 9 Feb. 1784. Her father was a surgeon, her uncle the physician and inventor John Mervin Nooth (1737-1828). Nothing is known of her education but she had a good grounding in romance languages, as witness the epigraphs and translations in her 1815 book, dedicated to her father’s patron the Duke of Kent (who took three copies). Other subscribers in the 15-page list include members of the gentry and aristocracy as well as a fair number of military men. One poem in the volume is addressed to Richard Valpy (q.v.) on his birthday in 1807 and is followed by his answering sonnet. A few poems reflect summer holidays in Ireland in 1806 and 1807; Nooth has been incorrectly identified as an Irish writer on that basis. Her preface hints at family misfortunes—probably the death of her father in Jan. 1815--and she must have been trying to raise money to support the family. There is also a novel in two volumes, Eglantine (1816). Her next book was an interesting translation from the French of Henri Grégoire, An Essay on the Nobility of the Skin; or, The Prejudice of White Persons . . . (1826). No further official records have been located and her later life has been a mystery until now, but three newspaper items reveal what became of her. The first is a poem on the occasion of Valpy’s retirement in 1829, signed from Paris by “C. G. Desmonstiers (late Charlotte Nooth).” She had written to Walter Scott from Paris in 1828. The second is a list of French peers denied places in government in 1830 because they had been appointed by the recently-abdicated King Charles X; it includes Nooth’s presumed husband, the Marquis Desmonstiers de Merinville. And the last is a notice of 1876 advertising “Unclaimed Money” for the next of kin of Charlotte Nooth or North, born in Dorchester in 1784 “and who married and died abroad.” Since the earliest notice of the legacy is 1876 it can be presumed that she had died not long before and that her husband had predeceased her. (findmypast.com 4 Mar. 2024; Reading Mercury 30 Nov. 1829; SJC 12 Aug. 1830; Weymouth Telegram 21 Jul. 1876; Millgate)