Author: Steel, Mary
Biography:
STEEL, Mary, formerly TAYLOR (1799-1872: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 6 Apr. 1799 at Framlingham, Suffolk, and baptised on 21 May 1800 at Halesworth Independent, one of at least nine children of Samuel Taylor (1764-1838), a dissenting watchmaker and parish workhouse overseer, and his wife Hannah Howard (1773-1849), who had married on 20 Sept. 1793 at Heveningham, Suffolk. Nothing is known of her education. She married William Francis Steel (1795-1884), a watchmaker, on 21 July 1826 at St. Michael’s, Framlingham. They went on to have four children. Her volume listed here, Pathetic and Religious Poems (1834) was printed for her at Saxmundham, Suffolk, where her husband traded. The verse was undistinguished but went through several editions. Her Early Days and Riper Years (1852) printed some of her early poetry written at Framlingham as well as later sacred verse. It included poems about a sister with consumption and the death of her elder sister, Hannah, in Oct. 1818. In 1843 her husband was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing a watch from his employer but was granted a free pardon in 1846. In the 1850s they were living in Lambeth, south London, and in the 1860s in Pimlico, Westminster. They later moved to Reading, Berkshire, where they were recorded in the 1871 census. She died on 11 Feb. 1872, aged 74 (sic), at 22 London Street, Reading, “after many years’ affliction.” Her husband also died there, in 1884. (ancestry.co.uk 9 Sept. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 9 Sept. 2024; Suffolk Chronicle 5 Aug. 1826; Reading Mercury 17 Feb. 1872; GRO death cert.; NA, Criminal Petitions 1843, HO/18/100/23) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Steel