Author: Tatlock, Eleanor
Biography:
TATLOCK, Eleanor, later Wilson (1769-1833: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised at Alverstoke, Hampshire, on 26 Apr. 1769, daughter of Richard Tatlock (c. 1720-77?), naval surgeon, and Elizabeth Smith (1735/6-97), who married in 1756. Their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1759 but in 1762 Richard Tatlock took space in the Public Advertiser to declare that he and his wife were no longer cohabiting, she having “consorted with another man” during his absence at sea. Eleanor’s birth would indicate that her parents had been reconciled. They might also have had a son, William, born in 1767 near Plymouth where Tatlock was stationed. However, Eleanor is the only child mentioned in her widowed mother’s 1792 will. The two women were then living in Southwark, London, but subsequently moved to Sandwich, Kent, where Elizabeth died. Eleanor Tatlock’s poetry is devoted in the main to religious themes, her work, both prose and poetry, appearing, signed “E.T.,” in the Evangelical Magazine and the Theological Magazine. A Wesleyan, she declared herself “though from principle a Dissenter, no Bigot.” Sometime after 1805 Tatlock moved from Sandwich to Buckinghamshire, living first in Wooburn (one poem is dated there 1810), and then in Great Marlow, where she wrote the preface to Poems, 1811. It was probably the move from Kent that prompted her longest poem, “Thoughts in Solitude,” which was “occasioned by having to move from a neighbourhood with friends to a distant village where she passed a gloomy winter.” Happily, the gloom lifted; she includes in the collection poems valuing friends made in Buckinghamshire as well as Kent. Tatlock was an abolitionist, exclaiming in one poem, “O Britain . . . How canst thou, gen’rous, brave, and wise,/Traffic in human merchandise!” and later commemorating the abolition of the slave trade with an “Ode to Humanity.” In 1814, at Matlock, Derbyshire, Tatlock married the Rev. John Wilson, a widowed Wesleyan clergyman. Her memory stayed alive in the Wilson family, for in 1911 a correspondent claiming a family connection wrote to the suffragist newspaper The Common Causequoting with approval from The Proposal, in which Tatlock makes an amusing, albeit heartfelt, plea for women to receive a university education. She died in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, and was buried at St Mary’s Parish Church on 20 Jan. 1833. (ancestry.co.uk 1 Oct. 2023; Public Advertiser 1 May 1762; Orlando 1 Oct. 2023; Evangelical Magazine 1805, 479, 599; The Common Cause 21 Dec. 1911, 652) EC