Author: Spence, Sarah
Biography:
SPENCE, Sarah, formerly CROMPTON (1758-1844: findmypast.com)
Sarah Spence’s volume published by subscription in Bury, Suffolk, in 1795, is surely the only book in this bibliography to have been produced explicitly to bring about the reconciliation of an estranged married couple—and it failed. That despite a stunning list of subscribers 13 pages long that includes gentry, writers, booksellers, and professional gentlemen from all over the country. Mrs. Barbauld and Capel Lofft (qq.v.) are on it, as are C. J. Fox, Gilbert Wakefield, Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharpe. In a prefatory statement Spence explains that her aim was to “regain the Esteem” of a man who had taken against her before he had had a chance really to know her. Sarah Crompton “of Maldon, Essex,” had married the widower George Spence (1750-1815) at St. Andrew by the Wardrobe, London, on 19 Mar. 1789. Spence was dentist to George III, with a fashionable practice on Old Bond Street. They had a daughter together but Spence left his new wife and took the baby with him; the child died. Spence eventually passed on his practice to his son George, died in London, and was buried at Whitefield’s Memorial Church in Camden on 19 Aug. 1815. (He was a practising nonconformist and thus registered the birth of his son.) In a will dated 13 July 1815 he left all his property and the profits of his Tooth Powder to Margaret Taylor, who was living with him at the time. Sarah Spence picked herself up; published a music primer in 1810 and more poems in 1821; and retired to Maldon, where she is recorded in the 1841 census as living on independent means with a schoolteacher and her three children. She died on 11 May 1844, aged 86, and was buried at the United Reform Church in Maldon. Her evangelical orientation is evident in the 1795 collection and might account for the paucity of public records, but she must have been the Sarah Crompton baptised at St. Mary’s, Walpole, Suffolk, on 1 Jan. 1759. The names of her parents are not given. One of her subscribers however was a Rev. Thomas Crompton (b 1761) of Belton near Yarmouth, who could have been a brother, and his father was John Crompton of Halesworth, Suffolk. (findmypast.com 16 Nov. 2024; Blain; Hereford Journal 1 Apr. 1789; ACAD; CCEd 16 Nov. 2024)
Other Names:
- S. Spence