Author: Yarrow, Ann
Biography:
Ann Yarrow (1761-1832: ancestry.com)
A likely candidate is Ann Griffin who, on 9 Apr. 1786, married Charles Yarrow (1759-1834). In 1790, he was a bookbinder and newspaper agent in Colmore Street, Birmingham. By 1798, he had moved to Thames Street, Kingston, Surrey, where he was a stationer, bookbinder, and printer. Ann and Charles were the parents of William (1792-1859), born at Birmingham, and of Harriet (b 1798), Sophia (b 1800), and Charles (1804-1852), born at Kingston. Baptized on 15 May 1762 the daughter of Thomas Griffin of Birmingham and Ann Griffin, his wife, she was buried on 14 Sept. 1832 in the churchyard of All Saints, Kingston. Mrs. Yarrow’s 124-page Original Poems includes some of the most egregious verse catalogued in this database: “For though you seem now proud to stay, / I see you’ll begone in an hour;” “the natives are so savage, / … they often make great ravage, / And eat up men.” There is a conventionally evangelical cast to several of her poems. That she was evangelical is buttressed by the identities of her printer, her publisher, and her dedicatees. Her London printer, Richard Gray Gunnell, printed Fraser’s Magazine and William Hone’s (q.v.) The Political House that Jack Built; otherwise, he specialized in books by evangelical authors. Her publisher, Hatchard of Piccadilly, was evangelical. Her dedicatee the Rev. Samuel Whitelock Gandy. Gunnell, vicar of Kingston upon Thames, was a Low Church follower of a famous evangelical priest, the Rev. Charles Simeon of Cambridge. She seems not to have supported a key evangelical cause, the abolition of slavery. Another of her dedicatees, MP Charles Nicholas Pallmer, was a slave owner; his sole interest as in parliament was in opposing emancipation bills. (ancestry.com 30 Sept. 2024; R. G. Thorne, History of Parliament online 1 Oct. 2024; Universal British Directory [1790], 2:241; London and Country Directory [1811], n.p.) JC
Other Names:
- Mrs. Yarrow