Author: Wrangham, Lucy
Biography:
WRANGHAM, Lucy Charlotte, later RAIKES (1811-89: ancestry.com)
The authorship of the nursery tale Life and Adventures of Mr. Pig and Miss Crane is disputed, but the attribution of it to Lucy Charlotte Wrangham is surely correct, since it is alluded to in the text and named directly in a footnote to her father Francis Wrangham’s (q.v.) Quadrupeds’ Feast (1829), p. 7. She would have been in her teens when she wrote it. She was the youngest child of Wrangham and his second wife Dorothy Cayley, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and baptised at Hunmanby on 28 Feb. 1811. On 29 Oct. 1836 she married a barrister, Henry Raikes, at St. John the Baptist, Chester, Cheshire, both parties being residents of the parish. Raikes would become registrar of the diocese of Chester and most of their ten children were born there. Raikes, however, was of an old Welsh family from Mold in Flintshire, Wales, and the family divided their time between Chester and Llwynegrin Hall, Mold, where the three youngest were born. Henry Raikes died at Llwynegrin Hall on 25 Oct. 1863. His widow continued to live mainly in Chester, where she was remembered as “a most benevolent lady”; she died on 17 Nov. 1889 at the Villa Farnese, Hygères, in the south of France where she had gone to spend the winter. Their most successful son, Henry Cecil Raikes, was an MP and Postmaster-General at the time, but he did not long outlive her. (ancestry.com 22 July 2024; findmypast.com 22 July 2024; “Raikes, Henry Cecil [1838-1891],” ODNB 22 July 2024; South Wales Daily News 20 Nov. 1889) HJ