Author: Snowden, Eleanor
Biography:
SNOWDEN, Eleanor, later DARBY (1809-1870: ancestry.co.uk)
There is no record for a baptism and the circumstances of her birth are problematic. In the later Censuses she claimed to have been born in Peckham, Surrey. As a young woman, she lived in Charlton, near Dover. At her marriage in 1838 (witnessed by a Mary Anne Snowden who was probably either her mother or her sister), she gave her father’s name as Platt Snowden, a solicitor, and did not indicate he was deceased. However, there are no educational, occupational, or life records for him--which is very unusual. She married Thomas Elde Darby (1781-1854), widower, at St. Martin’s in the Fields on 8 Apr. 1838. He had been educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, was captured at Verdun in the Napoleonic War, and remained a prisoner for several years. After the war, he served in the Embassy in Paris as Chargé d’Affaires. Later he was described as a "Land Proprietor and Fundholder" in the 1851 Census. They lived at 5 Queen Square, Westminster, for most of their married life until he died in 1854 and she was left with four young children: Rosalind Ellen (b 1839), Celia Elde (1841), Florence Elizabeth Victoria (1844), and Thomas Elde (1846). She published The Maid of Scio (1829), The Moorish Queen (1831), The Sweet South (1854), Lays of Love and Heroism (1855), Ruggiero Vivaldi (1865), and Legends of Many Lands (1870). She also contributed poems to the Dover Telegraph and other newspapers. Nearly all her verse exhibits the dual filiation of Byron and Hemans which she never seems to have outgrown. She died at 11 Fawcett Street, Kensington, and was buried at Brompton Cemetery on 15 Dec. 1870. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Aug. 2020; R. L. Arrowsmith, Charterhouse Register, 1769-1872 [1974], 105; Dover Telegraph 14 Apr. 1838, 29 Jul. 1854; GM Oct. 1854, 409; Illustrated London News 12 Aug. 1854) AA