Author: Robertson, Eliza Frances
Biography:
ROBERTSON, Eliza Frances (1771-1805: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised on 5 Feb. 1771 at St. John’s, Horsleydown, London, the daughter of David Robertson, an oilman and soapmaker, and Eliza Earle, the daughter of a wealthy Southwark woollen draper. Her parents had married at St. Giles, Camberwell, on 20 Aug.1767. Her father moved the family in 1776 to Stratford, Essex, where he expanded as a soap manufacturer. At sixteen she became a teacher in a boarding school in Richmond, Surrey, and soon became a partner. Her father had his assets seized by the Excise and the family removed to Chester for about five years, then to Sloane Street, Chelsea, where he set her up in her own school in late 1788. However, the Excise seized his assets again and the family suffered financial hardship. In 1795 she went into partnership with Charlotte Sharpe who ran a boarding school for young ladies at Croom’s Hill, Blackheath. She began to tell romantic tales of her origins and invented stories about her wealth in order to obtain credit. She lived lavishly and in 1800 bought a house in the fashionable Paragon of Blackheath. She went on obtaining credit claiming imminent inheritance but was eventually rumbled and fled to Cornwall. In early 1801, she and Charlotte Sharpe were tracked down in Huntingdon, arrested, and jailed. (In June 1801, she included a four-page “Poetical Epistle” to Charlotte Sharpe in Dividends of Immense Value). She was transferred to Bow Street, London, and then to the Fleet Prison. Creditors multiplied and there was no realistic prospect of release. In the Fleet, she managed to publish a novel, Destiny, or Family Occurrences (1802) and two versions of events in her autobiographical Life and Memoirs (1802) and Who are the Swindlers (1802?). The posthumous memoir prefixed to Consolatory Verses (1808) stated that she was also the author of didactic tracts, sermons for children, and a grammar, but gave no exact titles. These remain untraced and unattributed. A further work, An Essay on Emancipation, was unpublished. She died on 7 June 1805 in the Fleet and was buried four days later at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Jul. 2022; Joanne Major, “The Fair Swindler of Blackheath,” All Things Georgian website [includes newspaper reports]; GM Mar. 1801, 271-2; London Courier 18 Jun. 1805) AA
Other Names:
- Eliza F. Robertson