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Author: Watkins, Harriet

Biography:

WATKINS, Harriet (1789-1865: ancestry.co.uk) and Jane Penelope (1782-1860: ancestry.co.uk) 

Jane Penelope was baptised 17 Mar. 1782 at St. John, Cardiff, the eldest of at least eight children of the Rev. William Watkins (1747-1803) and his wife Jane Nowell (1750-1827). Her sister Harriet was baptised at Leigh on Mendip, Somerset, on 30 Sept. 1787. Their father later became Rector of Port Eynon, Glamorganshire, and died in 1803, leaving his widow with seven children. She survived on a small annuity and probably with the assistance of her family. (She was the daughter of the Rev. Cradock Nowell and sister of Vice-Admiral William Nowell.) By 1811 the family were at Stoke Lane, Somerset, from where the two sisters published their volume, Poems on a Variety of Subjects (1811), by subscription, with various extended-family members taking copies. The volume contained poems on the Glamorgan landscape of their youth, the death of their sister Martha the previous year, and the usual array of storms and maniacs. However, by 1817 Jane Penelope had begun the first of several appeals to the RLF, highlighting her connections to clergy of the Church of England. By 1821 she had moved to Bath, where she continued to live until her death. Her last years were spent in Partis College almshouse, Bath, where she died, 31 Aug. 1860. Harriet died at the vicarage of her brother, Charles Frederick, in Brixworth, Northants, on 23 Oct. 1865. (ancestry.co.uk 23 Jul. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 23 Jul. 2020; RLF 1/363; GM Apr. 1827, 381; Thompson Cooper, Men of the Time [8th edn. 1872], 951) AA

 

 

Other Names:

  • Miss Watkins
 

Books written (1):

Bath/London: printed by Meyler and Son / G. Robinson, 1812