Author: O'Neill, Frances
Biography:
O’NEILL, Frances, formerly CARROLL (fl 1789-1802)
“In fame obscure,/ In coin kept poor,/ Gods! How I envy Peter Pindar”: this is the semi-comical lament of Frances O’Neill in her one collection of verse, Poetical Essays, published in London in 1802. (Peter Pindar, i.e. John Wolcot, q.v., had both fame and a government pension.) Absolutely no public records have been found for her and it is necessary to rely on the internal evidence of the collection. She was born in Ireland. One of the poems “written in Dublin in 1789” marks her earliest known composition; another records her “Arrival in London,” where she failed to find what she was hoping for—an income, contentment, and literary friends. An acrostic on her own name, Fanny Carroll, ends also on a rueful note: “This is my first name, alas! My sex is frail,/ Else I had never changed it for O’Neill.” Rather surprisingly, there are no references to her husband or to children. The longest poem is a satire on a genteel household—she gives the address, which has been tentatively identified (Orlando) as the London home of Charles Bingham (1735-99), Baron Lucan, who became the first earl of Lucan in the Irish peerage in 1795, and his wife, the miniaturist Margaret (Smith) Bingham, Lady Lucan (1740-1814). O’Neill earned her living primarily as a needlewoman, so it might be that she came to London as part of the Lucan household. By 1802, however, she was working for shopkeepers. There is a poem on the air balloon “by Mrs. O’Neil, who works at Mrs. Robins’s, Upholsterer, Warwick Street, Golden Square.” Nothing is known of her later life. An “Ode to the Poppy,” much anthologised, appears to have been written not by her but by another Mrs. O'Neill, Henrietta O'Neill (d 1793). (ancestry.com 18 Mar. 2024; findmypast.com 18 Mar. 2024; Blain; Orlando 18 Mar. 2024; Lonsdale #293)
Other Names:
- Mrs. Frances O'Neill