Author: Patrickson, Margaret
Biography:
PATRICKSON, Margaret (1785-1862: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 16 Apr. 1785, the daughter Dr. Nicholas Patrickson (1754-1814) and his wife Jane Barton (1763-1843). Her father practised for many years in Queen Street, Cheapside, London. There is no extant parish record of her baptism or parents’ marriage but reconstruction is possible through the memorial at Stanwix church and family wills (Barton, Faulder, Patrickson, Pattinson). All four families were originally from Cumberland and several members subscribed to Miscellaneous Poems which was published by her uncle, Robert Faulder (1748-1815) of 42 New Bond Street, a well-known stationer and bookseller who had married her aunt Margaret Barton (1755-1836). Shortly before the publication of her poems she was introduced to the painter Henry Fuseli, who taught her intermittently until 1819 when she left for Edinburgh where she lived for about ten years and described herself as a portrait painter and teacher of drawing and painting. Around 1830 she moved to Paris, where she worked in great poverty as an English teacher and translator of Balzac. He described her in 1837 as “in the desert of her life,” “horrible, old, and toothless,” and a drunk (Tilby). In England her knowledge of French literature was described as “perhaps unequalled by that of any other English lady of the present day” (Monthly Magazine). She is thought to have lived in Paris for about twelve years before returning in the 1840s to Scotland and then Carlisle where she seems to have taught French. A pupil, Mary Smith, noted her excellent pronunciation, “somewhat Frenchified demeanour” and (echoing Balzac) certain “potent smells” which “led me to think that she cheered her solitude with other than literary stimulants” (Tilby). Her mother had also returned to Cumberland and died at Hawksdale, Cumberland, on 15 Sept. 1843, leaving her an annuity and land. She died on 1 Mar. 1862 at 22 Scotch Street, Carlisle, from apoplexy, paralysis, effusion on the brain, coma and exhaustion, and was buried at Stanwix, Cumberland. She left an estate of under £450. (ancestry.co.uk 16 Jun. 2021; Holden’s Directory 1805-7; Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli [1982] 512-36; Monthly Magazine Jul. 1835, 96 and May 1836, 438; Michael Tilby, "La ‘Miss Irlandaise’ d’Honoré de Balzac," L’année balzacienne [2014] 353-73; Carlisle Journal 30 Sept. 1843, 14 Mar. 1862) AA