Author: Sikes, Mrs. S.
Biography:
SIKES, Mrs. S. (fl 1812-15)
Mrs. Sikes was the author not only of the anodyne collection of Hymns and Poems, on Moral Subjects, listed here, but apparently also of two three-volume novels recorded by Allibone, Sir Walter Darien (1812) and Morgiana (n.d.), of which no trace has been found (and they are not in EN2). Her poems come with an impressive ten pages of subscribers—bishops, clergymen, clergyman’s wives, and many apparently ordinary families, most of them at addresses in central London and the surrounding counties, especially Sussex. There are no Sikes subscribers. A Miss Ogg of Dunkeld in Scotland subscribed for an unusually large number, 20 copies: she may have been Mary Dorothea Ogg (1762-1839), born in London, who was governess to the children of the Duke of Atholl. Internal evidence suggests a wellborn woman with connections mostly in London and the south of England. It is nevertheless likely that although born in London and maintaining contacts there, she was Susanna Sikes, daughter of Laetitia and David Powell, and the wife of the Rev. Thomas Sikes (1766-1834), graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, who had been the vicar of Guilsborough, Northamptonshire, since his ordination in 1792. If so, both wife and husband were born in Hackney, London, and were baptised there, she on 18 Dec. 1765 and he on 16 Mar. 1766. They were married on 23 Feb. 1797 at St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, London; the marriage appears to have been childless. In the census of 1841 she is recorded as a widow of independent means, aged 75, living in the parish of St. John Hackney, London. But she died at the Vicarage, Guilsborough, and was buried at St. Ethelreda’s on 28 Jan. 1846. (ancestry.com 23 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 23 Oct. 2024; CCEd 23 Oct. 2024; LES 15 Dec. 1834; Northampton Mercury 31 Jan. 1846)