Author: Sherwood, Martha Lennox
Biography:
SHERWOOD, Martha Lennox, later HODGES (1784-1824: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 8 Jan. and baptised 6 Feb. at Saint Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street, London, the daughter of Henry Sherwood (1752-1803) and his second wife, Mercy Taylor (1753-1829), who had married in 1779. Her father was originally from Coventry but later moved to Bethnal Green. Extravagant and radical, he had “imbibed certain American notions of the government of nations, and often talked of freedom and the liberty of the people, and other republican sentiments” (Life of Mrs. Sherwood), and went over to France in 1787 to join “the revolutionary party.” The results of this adventure were predictable and he returned to England penniless where he died in 1803, leaving his wife, Mercy, very little. By then she had at least three daughters and two sons to bring up. (A daughter, Mercy, had died in France.) It is unclear why Martha Lennox Sherwood was in Coombhays, near Honiton, Devon in 1812-14 but it seems possible that following the death of her father, the family’s financial situation, always difficult, worsened. Her Rural Imagery (Exeter 1812), dedicated to Louisa Carolina Graves (q.v.), was published by subscription and may have been an attempt to raise money. (She also published Amusing Translations; or, Classic Tales from the French [1814], again by subscription, but it does not appear to have been any more successful and was originally projected as two volumes but probably scaled back.) Subscribers were mostly local to Devon but included various members of the extended Sherwood family who lived elsewhere (Butt, Maskall). Martha Lennox returned to London to marry John Hodges, a potter, on 12 June 1814 at Saint Matthew, Bethnal Green. They lived first at Holywell Lane and then Hackney Road, baptising four children at St. Leonard’s Shoreditch. At some stage she may have left the established church as she was buried at Gibraltar Row, Bethnal Green, a Dissenters’ burial ground, on 11 July 1824, aged 40. Rural Imagery (1812) contains some dull religious and occasional verse but also more exotic fare, recording her experiences in France and Devon: "Maternal Tenderness," "Geneva," "War," "Mont Jura" and "Rural Imagery." She clearly had literary ambitions but does not appear to have published further after her marriage. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Oct. 2020; Rural Poems [1812]; "Sherwood, Mary Martha," ODNB 24 Oct. 2020; Sophia Kelly, ed., The Life of Mrs Sherwood [1857], 66-68, 154-156, 504) AA