Author: Temple, Laura Sophia
Biography:
TEMPLE, Laura Sophia, later SWEETMAN (1783-1848: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised on 3 July 1783 at Chester, the daughter of Lieut.-Colonel Richard Temple and his wife Frances Hoare. She was rebaptised on 13 November 1813 at St. Mary-on-the-Quay, Bristol (Catholic), when she was given a later birth date of 1788, possibly to enhance her marriage prospects. Her mother had literary interests and published a novel, Ferdinand Fitzormond, or the Fool of Nature (1805), which is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Laura Sophia. An elder sister, Maria Catharine, died in 1802 at Bristol. Her mother wrote a commemorative poem (GM [Sept. 1802] 854) and Laura Sophia wrote a sketch of her life including some poems (Monthly Magazine Dec. 1802). Thereafter she submitted several of her own poems to the Monthly and reprinted them in her collections of 1805 and 1808, which were well received and aroused the interest of Wordsworth and Coleridge (qq.v.). A third collection, The Siege of Zaragoza (1812), was less successful and a fourth, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the Dead Sea (1818), passed virtually unnoticed and is here attributed for the first time. A fifth, Amaldo (1824), was announced but appears not to have been published. She continued to write, however, and contributed poems to the Belle Assemblée (1824-1831) under the signature L. S. S., as well as to other periodicals. In 1816 she married Samuel Bedlow Sweetman in Bath but the following year he was declared bankrupt, forcing them to apply for assistance to the Royal Literary Fund in 1818 and again in 1820. Her mother had died in 1812 and her father in 1823, leaving them his house in Camden Street, Islington. Nevertheless, their financial difficulties must have returned as they moved to Rotherhithe, a notoriously poor area, where she died on 23 March 1848, and was buried a week later at Nunhead Cemetery. Her husband survived her, remarried the following year, and described himself as a cement manufacturer--which may be a manufactured story. He died in St. Albans in 1864. The fullest account of her early life was contained in Flowers of Literature for 1808-1809 (1810), which included a portrait. She was still admired in the 1820s through her Belle Assemblée contributions, was still active in the 1830s, but died in poverty and obscurity. (ancestry.co.uk 19 Jul. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 19 Jul. 2020; Francis William Blagdon, ed., The Flowers of Literature for 1808-1809 [1810] 26-9; RLF 1/379; GM [Mar. 1812], 394-5, [Feb. 1823], 188, [Aug. 1824], 162; Aldine Magazine [1839], Colburn’s United Service Magazine pt. 2 [1848] 159; New Monthly Magazine May 1816, 371) AA
Other Names:
- Laura Sophia Sweetman