Author: Swarbreck, Delia Caroline
Biography:
SWARBRECK, Delia Caroline, formerly DIGHTON (1804?-64: ancestry.co.uk)
Her death certificate and a census record indicate a birth of 1804/5 (St. Martin’s in the Fields) but there is no record of a baptism and there is circumstantial evidence that she was born in 1793. She was the daughter of Robert Dighton (1751-1814), artist, print designer, and singer, and his second wife Catherine Caroline Burtells (1759-1824), a Vauxhall Gardens soprano; the couple may not have married. (They had sung together at Sadler’s Wells in 1792.) They baptised four children at St. Martin’s in the Fields, London, between 1791 and 1799. At his death, Letitia Sarah (1775-1840), his daughter from his first marriage, was declared his sole legitimate heir and granted administration, which may indicate that he did not remarry. A Delia Eleanor Dighton was born on 11 May 1793 and baptised at St. Martin in the Fields on 20 July. This may be “Delia Caroline” and was possibly the daughter he tried to put on the stage in 1812 to assist him “in my present pecuniary embarrassment” (ODNB). Delia Caroline Dighton married the artist and non-practising solicitor Samuel Dunkinfield Swarbreck (1798-1865) at St. Marylebone on 13 Sept. 1823 but it was only announced in the newspapers a year later, in the month of her mother’s death, for reasons unknown. She was not recorded as a minor (which she would have been had she been born in 1804/5) and a further complication is that a witness was Eleanor Dighton. Her husband achieved some fame with his Sketches in Scotland Drawn from Nature and on Stone (1839), 26 lithographs which further established the kilts and castles in a sublime landscape view of “Romantic Scotland.” She is recorded in the 1851 Census of 30th March as living with Swarbreck at 25 Camden Grove, Kensington. There does not appear to have been any issue. She died on 25 July 1864 at King’s College Hospital, aged 60. Her husband was recorded in the 1861 Census as a lodger in Upper John Street, off Golden Square, where he died on 30 June 1865. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Apr. 2024; “Dighton, Robert,” ODNB 28 Apr. 2024; D. Rose, Life, Times, and Recorded Works of Robert Dighton (1752-1814) [1981]; Highfill 4: 412-16; Morning Post 28 Apr. 1824; York Herald 8 July 1865; GRO death cert.) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. Saml. Dukinfield Swarbreck