Author: Smyth, George Lewis
Biography:
SMYTH, George Lewis (1801-53: ancestry.co.uk)
He was probably born in Ireland, possibly in Tipperary or Wexford, but it is not known where, nor who his parents were. He was probably Catholic. Nothing is known of his education and he did not attend Trinity College Dublin. By 1826 he was in London, and as a “Student at Law” published The Monuments of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey(1826), a vast 959-page compendium of monumental and biographical notices which he continued to revise and issue in various formats. It seems unlikely that he would have studied at one of the Inns of Court (if he was Catholic) and he was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea 1826-7. His historical drama Queen Anne Boleyn (1834) attracted little attention. In the 1830s he acted as an agent for railway companies in Ireland and by 1838 had established himself at 16 Bridge Street, Westminster, as a Parliamentary Agent, defending and advising on Irish matters, and working closely with Daniel O’Connell, MP, (1775-1847), the leading representative of Irish Catholics. His pamphlet Aids to the Irish Poor Law (1838) noted that absentee landlords preferred “to spend their fortunes in the giddy frivolities of London dissipation, or in the pampered excesses of foreign cities, than to bestow them on the employment of a starving population. . . . The projected Poor-law for Ireland must lay an iron hand on these heartless absentees.” His Ireland: Historical and Statistical (3 vols. 1844-49) was highly regarded. He died, aged 52, from heart disease, on 10 Feb. 1853 at 5 Great Queen Street, Westminster, with his occupation recorded as Parliamentary Agent. He does not appear to have married and left a couple of hundred pounds in annuities for his god-daughters and the twenty-year unexpired lease on his house. There is, however, some evidence from the 1851 census that the “Aunt Jeannie” mentioned in the will may have been his common-law wife, and the “god-daughters” his daughters. (findmypast.co.uk 14 Sept. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 14 Sept. 2024; Tipperary Free Press 19 Feb. 1853; GRO, death cert.; NA, Will, Prob. 11/2167/375, Administration, C17/1/263; MH 5 Aug. 1853) AA