Author: Tartt, William Macdowal
Biography:
TARTT, William Macdowal (1788-1881:ancestry.co.uk) pseudonym Charles Leftly the Younger
He was born 9 January 1788 at Chester, the son of Thomas Tartt, merchant, and his wife, Sarah Maria Bowers, who had married in 1782. (His middle name appears variously in library catalogues as MacDowall, McDowall, and MacDowell, but Macdowal is the spelling he used in his first publication and in his will.) As a young man he published Odes, Sonnets, and Other Poems (1808) with a dedication to William Roscoe (q.v.), an undistinguished volume but with local topographical poems of minor interest. Not long after publication, he went to America and probably lived in Charleston, South Carolina; he later wrote a paper on earthquakes in SC. He wrote America, an Epistle: with Other Poems (1820), the title poem of which had appeared the previous year under the name of Charles Leftly for reasons unknown. (This cannot be Charles Leftley [q.v., 1771-98] to whom it has sometimes been attributed.) A continuation in response to the American Civil War, signed T., was printed in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1862. On his return to England, Tartt stayed for some time in London, trading as W. M. Tartt and Co. at Old Broad Street, but the venture was not successful and he was involved in bankruptcy proceedings (1816-1819). He seems to have moved back to Liverpool where he married Martha Carrington (1798-1867), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, on 7 May 1821. They moved first to Lyme Regis, Dorset, and then to Cheltenham, Gloucester, where he became a County magistrate. Martha’s unmarried sister Mary lived with them. For the rest of their lives they lived at 1 Sandford Place, Bath Road, Cheltenham, where he died on 24 Dec. 1881, leaving just under £7000. In later life, Tartt continued to publish, sometimes anonymously, in the Liverpool-based annual Winter’s Wreath and the literary journals Athenaeum, New Monthly Magazine, and Bentley’s Miscellany. He collected his essays on the lives of various artists and writers in Essays on Some Modern Works: Chiefly Biographical( 1876). The most famous essay is on William Blake (q.v.), "Pictor Ignotus," but he also wrote important essays on obscure women writers, and much else. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Jan. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 3 Jan. 2021; Watkins (1816); S&W; Boyle; Bentley’s Miscellany 52 [1862] 177-8; Lancaster Gazette 12 May 1821; Cheltenham Chronicle 8 Jan. 1867; Cheltenham Mercury 31 Dec. 1881) AA
Other Names:
- W. M. Tartt
- Charles Leftly the Younger