Author: Sanderson, A.
Biography:
SANDERSON, A. (fl 1819-20)
Although her publications of 1819-20, all printed for her in North Shields, Northumberland, provide specific details about her family background, Mrs. Sanderson has proved hard to identify with confidence. The most helpful is the subscription edition of Poems on Various Subjects (1819) which not only supplies her credentials and her birth name as the “daughter of the late Robert Stephenson, Esq., Captain of the Northumberland Regiment of Militia” but reveals the extent of her contacts, from the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland and several MPs through a nine-page list of humbler people in a relatively small geographical circle that encompasses Newcastle, Northumberland, and Durham. The contents are the usual occasional poems about the author’s reading, her friends, a sister, the death of Princess Charlotte, and tributes to some professional men closer to home. In the same year, she brought out a prose Letter addressed to the Officers of the Army recommending gold spectacles and short pipes to make the men more comfortable on long marches; that volume also contains a poem entitled “War in the West” which is only four pages long. Similarly, A Poem . . . Inscribed . . . [to] the Queen (1820) is only seven pages. She does not seem to have appeared again in print, and her later life remains a mystery. Public records produce no certainty. It is very likely that her first name was Ann. There are at least two candidates for recently deceased Robert Stephensons in the county. She might have been Ann Stephenson, daughter of Robert Stephenson (no mother’s name is provided), who was baptised at Earsdon by North Shields on 18 Mar. 1770, and/or the one who married William Sanderson in Newcastle on 22 Aug. 1798. (ancestry.com 15 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 15 Sept. 2024) HJ
Other Names:
- Mrs. A. Sanderson