Author: Wassell, Mary Ann
Biography:
WASSELL, Mary Anne (1779-1860: ancestry.com)
She was born on 19 Jan. 1779 and baptised on 7 Feb. at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the second of at least six children of Joseph Wassell, pawnbroker, and his wife Elizabeth Johnson, who had married at St. Clement Danes, Strand, Westminster, in 1776. The family lived in Parliament Street, near Westminster Abbey. On her father’s death in 1803, she received interest and dividends on annuities of £4000 with a further £1000 to be paid on marriage. Nothing is known of her education. At some point she moved to Norfolk and lived at Ringstead. She formed a liaison with a Dr. Pinfold and was convinced they would marry. They did not and in 1816 he began to court another woman, Catherine North, whom Wassell harassed relentlessly in Norfolk and London. She was bound over to keep the peace but still pursued her rival and was imprisoned. Pinfold died and she then litigated for money she said he owed her (£10,000 and £600 a year promised and £6,000 lent to him). In 1826 she was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment at Birmingham for harassment of a Dr. Wake who she claimed had a piece of paper proving her claim against the Pinfold estate. She gave her version of events in The Rivals (1815) listed here and in a volume announced but which may not have appeared: The Clandestine Courtship, or Motives Elucidated (1824). Trial reports are given in the newspapers referenced below. Her litigiousness resurfaced in Aug. 1824 when she sued a tenant who had rented one of her cottages and left early. In 1836 she is recorded at the free school, Hunstanton, Norfolk, but by 1845 was running a boarding-house. In 1851 she was living with a servant in the High Street, Hunstanton. She died on 5 June 1860, aged 81, at 1 Oak Villas, Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and was buried there. She left an estate of under £1000 to be administered by her brother Joseph. (ancestry.co.uk 23 Apr. 2023; The Representative 27 June 1826; Norfolk Chronicle 26 Apr. 1817, 27 Nov. 1824, 16 June 1860; MH 18 Jan. 1824; Birmingham Journal 29 July, 23 Sept. 1826; William White, History, Gazeteer, and Directory, of Norfolk [1836], 633, [1845], 641; Morning Post 18 Jan. 1803; GRO death cert.) AA
Other Names:
- Miss Wassell