Author: Timbury, Jane
Biography:
TIMBURY, Jane (1747-1807: findmypast.co.uk)
She was born on 18 July 1747 and baptised the following month at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the daughter of John Timbury, a perukmaker (wig maker), and his wife Mary Doyle, who married in the Fleet on 6 Jan. 1744/5. She seems to have lived her entire life in the area around Westminster Abbey. Her father probably died in 1775 and thereafter she seems to have lived with her mother and sister. In 1787 she published The History of Tobit (1787), which she also sold from her address in Petty France. Subscribers included a Mr. Timbury of Dummer, Hampshire, who took ten copies; her cousin Jane Chittendon in Maidstone; and her aunt Mary Timbury, wife of Benjamin Timbury, who lived nearby in Orchard Street. It included a poem on the death of Charles Churchill (d 1764) written when she was fifteen [sic]. She also published a rendering of Sterne into verse, The Story of Le Fevre (1787), and (most probably) The Power of Music (1787) from the same publisher. Her prose consists of three novels, The Male Coquet (1770, 1788), The Triumph of Friendship, or the History of Charles Courtney, and Miss Julia Melville (1789)--a copy of which has never been located although it was reviewed--and The Philanthropic Rambler (1790-1791). After the death of her mother, she applied to the RLF for assistance. Thomas Alexander Atwood, the curate of St. Margaret’s, supported her application and wrote that “she has experienced great difficulties for fifteen years past, six of which she had a helpless Mother to support, and since her death, a sister who never enjoy’d a weeks health for upwards of seven years. J. Timbury is between fifty and sixty years of age her health very indifferent, her means of subsistence a School which at present consists of no more than eight scholars . . .” (ALS, 14 Nov. 1803, RLF 1/146/2). She was awarded five guineas but in 1806 was on the famous list of 74 persons whose applications would no longer be considered (for reasons unknown). Her mother had died in 1802 and was buried at St. Margaret’s on 27 June 1802. She died unnoticed and was buried on 5 Mar. 1807. (findmypast.co.uk 24 Mar. 2021; Westminster Archives; RLF 1/146) AA