Author: Stanley, Mrs.
Biography:
STANLEY, Ann Charlotte, formerly Miles (1791-1863: ancestry.com)
A Venn diagram of subscribers to several books of poetry published in the 1810s and 1820s suggests that the author of Tales and Poems, “Mrs. Stanley,” was associated with a set of poets, songwriters, artists, surveyors, architects, builders, and businessmen. The set includes: builders and architects John Christmas, John Lockyer, S. Hutchins, and Robert Abraham; surveyors Richard Frederick Coultart and Nathaniel Lipscombe (q.v.); artists Caleb Robert Stanley, John Christmas (as above), and John Plura of Bath; businessmen, relatives of Henry Man (q.v.), Lawrence Desborough, Henry Desborough, and James Man; and poets Dorothea Primrose Campbell, Harriet Downing (qq.v.), Charles Hague, and Mary Jane Coultart. This confluence of names and professions points to Ann Charlotte Miles, the future Mrs. Stanley, who was born on 2 Dec. 1791 and baptized in London on 29 May 1792 at St George, Hanover Square, a daughter of Richard Miles of London and his wife, Amelia Caroline Larratt. On 10 Jan. 1817, she married Caleb Robert Stanley (1795-1868), a landscape painter who frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy. He had a house and gallery in Maddox Street, Hanover Square, to which he and his family moved in 1816 from Thayer Street. The couple had three daughters and three sons. Mrs. Stanley and John Stanley of Maddox Street subscribed to Harriet Downing’s 1816 volume, Mary; or, Female Friendship: A Poem, as did Mrs. Stanley’s subscriber John Christmas. Another of Downing’s subscribers, Lady Jane Blizard of Grove Terrace, Kentish Town, was an aunt of Caleb Stanley’s cousin Susanna Stanley. Mrs. Stanley’s subscribers John Christmas and James Lockyer subscribed to Dorothea Primrose Campbell’s 1816 Poems, as did her subscriber Mary Jane Coultart, a song writer who published poems in the Lady’s Magazine and in the Mirror of Literature. All three subscribers—Coultart, Christmas, and Lockyer—lived in Upper Thornhaugh Street. “Mrs. Stanley” of Thayer Street, Marylebone, subscribed to Campbell’s Poems. Three of Mrs. Stanley’s subscribers also lived in Thayer Street and they too subscribed to Campbell’s Poems, Mr. and Mrs. Holmes, members of the Royal Society of Arts (Ann Charlotte Stanley’s brother-in-law George Stanley too was a member). The Thayer Street-Maddox Street connection strongly suggests that the poet “Mrs. Stanley” was Ann Charlotte, the wife of artist Caleb Robert Stanley. That woman died in 1863 in Middlesex Hospital. She was buried on 4 Sept. at St. George’s, Hanover Square. (ancestry.com 27 Nov. 2024; Google Books) JC