Author: Rutherfoord, Eliza
Biography:
RUTHERFOORD, Eliza (1792-1851: ancestry.com)
The poet was born on 22 June 1792, the fourth child in a family of ten. She was baptized on 22 July at the Independent Chapel in Gravel Lane, where also were all of her siblings. Her father, John Rutherfoord (otherwise Rutherford; 1758-1812), was a London apothecary. His wife, Lydia Rebecca Duplex (1764-1849), Eliza’s mother, was the daughter of a Methodist artisan. The poet dedicated her only book, Maternal Sketches; with Other Poems, to an unlikely person, Lousia Hope, the wife of Thomas Hope, a fabulously wealthy art collector. How she came to be associated with a woman clearly not from her own class is unclear. Her only other known publication, “Just Like Hope!—A Song,” appeared in the Belfast Newsletter on 29 June 1832. Her poems, saccharine, emotive, and sentimental, matched the sensibility of a surprising number of magazine critics: in the New Monthly (“much feeling and tenderness"); the Imperial (“entitled to more attention than three-fourths of … rhyming publications”); the Metropolitan (“sweet, unpretending … perused with great pleasure”); the World of Fashion (“peculiarly appropriate for our magazine”); the Athenæum (“domestic pictures drawn truly from the heart … quiet poetic grace and household tranquility”); La Belle Assemblée (“production of an elegant mind and feeling heart”); the Lady’s (“a long time since we took up a volume which has pleased us more than this”); the Evangelical (“a work of real merit …. Christian families may put this poem into the hands of their daughters, without any fear of tainting their morals, or vitiating their imaginations”). MR was dismissive (“another of that numerous tribe of minor poetry”). She was a woman of sufficient means who had a wide range of female acquaintance. In the 1830s she travelled extensively on the Continent with a female companion. She died, unmarried, at Florence, on 15 Dec. 1851. In her will, she left legacies to servants, to her French travelling companion, to nephews and nieces, to the Institution for the Benefit of Governesses, and to “any charity for diseased respiration.” The residue she left to two of her unmarried sisters. In 1815, she subscribed to Elizabeth Robinson King’s (q.v.) Poems and Reflections. That volume’s printer, Howlett, also printed Rutherfoord’s Maternal Sketches. (ancestry.com 29 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 29 Oct. 2024; PROB 11/1535; PROB 11/2150; GM 37 [1852], 211; St James’s Chronicle, 20 Dec. 1851) JC