Author: West, Harriet
Biography:
WEST, Harriet, formerly ATKINSON (1789-1839: Memoir)
She was born on 22 Mar. 1789 and baptised on 21 Apr. at Bolton Percy, Yorkshire, the second daughter of Rev. Christopher Atkinson, formerly Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, and his wife Catherine (Kitty) Leicester, daughter of Sir Peter Byrne Leicester, who had married in 1785. She would have been educated at home in a wealthy and intellectual environment. She married Rev. John West (1778-1845) on 2 Oct. 1807 at Wethersfield, Essex. They had perhaps as many as twelve children. He spent two periods as a missionary in Canada, 1820-23 and 1825-6. His wife did not accompany him. Between these assignments he was named Rector of Chettle, Dorset. She was also deeply religious and Sacred Poems (1833), which was published “under the Direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education, appointed by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge,” consists of poems mostly on Biblical subjects, but her husband included many of her somewhat fresher and more personal poems in his Memoir (1839, 2nd edn. 1842). She died on 23 Mar. 1839 at Chettle, with her last illness and death recounted in a moving though hagiographical account by her husband (Memoir 1842, 229-278). (John West, Memoir of Mrs. John West [1842]; ancestry.co.uk 30 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 30 Aug. 2022; CCEd [father and husband] 30 Aug. 2022; DCB [John West]; Bath Chronicle 4 Apr. 1839; GM May 1839, 554, Feb. 1846, 213) AA
Other Names:
- Mrs. West