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Author: Tennant, Charles

Biography:

TENNANT, Charles (1796-1873: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 1 July 1796 at 62, Russell Square, London, and baptised on 22 Dec. at St. George’s, Bloomsbury, the second son and one of nine children of George Tennant (1765-1832), attorney, and Margaret Elizabeth Beetson (1770-1850), who had married at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, in 1792. His father had a practice at 2 Gray’s Inn Square and later became a wealthy landowner in Glamorgan, Wales. (He part-financed the building of the Neath and Tennant Canal, and owned the Cadoxton estate.) Charles was educated at Harrow, articled to his father in 1812, and admitted as partner in 1821. On his father’s death in 1832, he became head of the firm. He retired in 1866. He was MP for St. Albans, Hertfordshire (1830-1) and supported the Reform Act of 1832. He was also one of the founders of the National Colonisation Society which promoted emigration to the colonies. He married, on 11 Sept. 1847 at Hyde, Isle of Wight, Gertrude Barbara Rich Collier (1819-1918). She was the daughter of Admiral Henry Theodosius Browne Collier, and famous in her own right as a salonière and society hostess. They had five daughters and a son. He died on 10 Mar. 1873 at 2 Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, Westminster, and was buried at Highgate. He left an estate of under £14,000. When his wife, Gertrude, died in 1918, her estate was valued at £80,000. The State of Man(1834), a somewhat old-fashioned and prolix poem on the Divine purpose of Creation, had few readers in its day and has had fewer since. His prose writings are more varied but still dull: A Tour through parts of the Netherlands, Holland, Germany, Switzerland . . . (1824), A Letter . . . on Systematic Colonization(1830), The People’s Blue Book (1857), Utilitarianism (1864),The Bank of England and the Organization of Credit (1866). (ODNB [Gertrude (née Collier) Barbara Rich Tennant]; ancestry.co.uk 10 July 2023; historyofparliamentonline.org; The Queen 22 Mar. 1873; David Waller, The Magnificent Mrs Tennant [2009]) AA

 

 

Books written (1):

London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1834