Catherine Eliza Richardson

Catherine Eliza Richardson (née Scott 24 November 1777 – 9 October 1853; often called Caroline Eliza Richardson,[n 1] and published as Mrs. G. G. Richardson) was a Scottish author and poet who published a four-volume novel and three collections of verse.

Catherine Eliza Richardson
Portrait of Catherine Eliza Richardson
Portrait of Catherine Eliza Richardson
Born(1777-11-24)24 November 1777
Canonbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
Died9 October 1853(1853-10-09) (aged 75)
Canonbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
OccupationNovelist
SpouseGilbert Geddes Richardson (m. 1799)
Children5

Biography

Catherine Eliza Richardson was born in 1777 to Phoebe Scott (née Dixon) and James Scott, a landowner of considerable property and Justice of the peace in the Scottish borders village of Canonbie, Dumfriesshire. She is described being 'born into favourable circumstances' as one of a 'numerous family of brothers and sisters', of 'educated and intellectual' parents.[1]

Her childhood was spent in the borders, but in 1799 she travelled to India,[2] where on 29 April at Fort George, Madras she married her cousin Gilbert Geddes Richardson, a mariner, captain of an East Indiaman and partner in a trading house, Colt, Baker, Hart & Co.[3] Her connection with India is specified as her uncle, 'General, afterwards Lord Harris'.[1][n 2]

She quickly had five children with Gilbert;[1] he is recorded as having died on 30 August 1805.[3] She returned from India to Canonbie to raise her young children, but moved to London during their teenage years, returning once more to Canonbie in 1821, where she remained until her death on 9 October 1853.[1][n 3]

Richardson was an intimate of Thomas Carlyle, who in his Reminiscences remarks on her as 'poor and hospitable Mrs. Richardson, once a "novelist" of mark, much of a gentlewoman and loved by us both.'[4][5]

Works

Richardson's first-published work is thought to be the 1801 four-volume novel Adonia - A Desultory Story; her authorship rests on strong circumstantial evidence - the published volumes omits the author's name.[2][n 4]

She published poems in a short-lived London Weekly Review (LWR) periodical edited by David Lester Richardson in the 1827-29 period, and he is supposed to have encouraged her to publish collections on her own account.[2] Henry Colburn's The New Monthly Magazine, in a review of Poems, speculated that the two were related;[6] David Richardson was an East India Company officer, on furlough to the UK during the LWR period.[7]

In 1828 she published a first collection, Poems, by private subscription running to 1,700 copies.[2] It was reviewed with considerable scorn in The Edinburgh Literary Journal: 'How Mrs. G. G. Richardson took it into her head to publish a volume of "Poems" is a good deal more than we can understand...';[8] and more blandly in The Athenaeum as a work of 'chasteness ... of thought and language, pleasing and appropriate similes, natural metaphors and very gentle pathos ... [with] a vein of melancholy running through the whole.'[9] Poems was reprinted in 1828 and a third edition published in 1829;[2] a review of the third in The Imperial Magazine remarked on the number of reprints. It characterised the subject-matter as 'local, circumscribed and domestic' and 'not of the highest order', but found that 'excellencies of a more exalted order occasionally burst upon us', which 'compensate for obvious deficiencies' and render the work 'in an unquestionably respectable light.[10]

Richardson next published Poems: Second Series in 1834.[2] A review in The Metropolitan found them 'above the common-place' and 'with considerable humour', but 'unequal within themselves', having blemishes or faults which detract from first impressions.[11] The New Monthly Magazine received the second series with high praise: 'full of poetic gems' each without exception showing 'evidence of an elegant and highly cultivated mind'.[12] A third set of poems, Grandmamma's Sampler; with some other Rhymes for Children was published in 1836.[2]

Chambers's Journal commented in 1876 that Richardson was in the class of 'forgotten or little known poets', and opines that her work 'is not characterised by striking originality of thought', but 'clear and pure, sometimes sparking, more frequently soft and gentle'. The article notes that she continued to write poetry during the latter years of her life, as well as stories, some of which were published.[13]

Summary of works

Notes
  1. A blog post for a University of Victoria English class, citing birth and baptism registries, suggests that her given name was Catherine not Caroline, and asserts the use of the latter rests on a mistake made by Mrs. MacArthur, a relative, who supplied the biography used in The Scottish Minstrel and relied upon by subsequent biographers. Richardson's published work was anonymous, initialled (C.E.R.; C.E.; or R.), or as Mrs. G. G. Richardson. Scottish Women Poets - Mrs. G. G. Richardson (1777-1853). The ODNB concurs in its use of Catherine.
  2. George Harris, 1st Baron Harris fits the description of a General, later elevated to the peerage, active in Madras in 1799, but his connection with the Scottish Richardson family is unclear.
  3. Jackson in the ODNB specifies that she returned to England with three of her children; Mrs. MacArthur specifies she had five children, all of whom survived her.
  4. Mrs. MacArthur suggests that Richardson wrote a three-volume novel, Adonia in the 1820s or 1830s; Frank Miller's The poets of Dumfriesshire (1910) repeats this assertion.

References
  1. MacArthur, Mrs (1870). Rogers, Charles (ed.). The Scottish Minstrel: The Songs of Scotland Subsequent to Burns with Memoirs of the Poets. Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo. pp. 177–179.
  2. Jackson, J. R. de J. "Richardson [née Scott], Catherine Eliza (1777–1853), poet and novelist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23545. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. Campbell, Lawrence Dundas (1809). "Deaths". The Asiatic Annual Register. J. Debrett: 185.
  4. Miller, Frank (1910). The Poets of Dumfriesshire. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons. p. 265.
  5. Carlyle, Thomas (1881). Froude, James Anthony (ed.). Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle. New York: Harper and Brothers. p. 238.
  6. "Poems by Mrs. G. G. Richardson, Dumfries". The New Monthly Magazine. 1928.
  7. "Biographical Sketches No.1 - D.L.R". Calcutta Monthly Journal. For the year 1838: 1–16. 1839.
  8. "Mrs. G. G. Richardson of Dumfries". The Edinburgh Literary Journal. 1: 120. 1829.
  9. "Mrs. G. G. Richardson's Poems". The Athenaeum. 1: 36–37. 1828.
  10. Drew, Samuel (1929). "Review.- Poems by Mrs. G. G. Richardson, Dumfries. 8vo. pp.250 Simkin London 1829". The Imperial Magazine. 11.
  11. Cochrane, James (1834). "Notices of New works - Poems by Mrs. G. G. Richardson". The Metropolitan. 11: 123.
  12. "Critical Notices - Mrs. G. G. Richardson - Second Series". The New Monthly Magazine. Part the First: 108–109. 1835.
  13. "The Poems of Mrs. G. G. Richardson". Chambers' Journal. 4. 13: 607–609. 16 September 1876.

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