Foster, Mrs E. M. Frederic and Caroline, or the Fitzmorris Family. William Lane, Minerva-Press , 1800, 2 vols .
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177 results for smallpox
Mrs E. M. Foster:
Frederic and Caroline, or the Fitzmorris Family, 1800, another novel in two volumes, tells the story of the Fitzmorris family (with two generations of Frederics and Carolines). Its attribution gives it to the author of Rebecca, Judith, and Miriam, and like Emily of Lucerne it is dedicated to the Princess of Wales . In an interesting Preface the author apologizes for using quotations without attribution, but she implies that books are inaccessible to her: she says she is fixed in a spot where literary amusement must be purchased, and when, she enquires, did the purse of an Authoress overflow with cash? It would be a mistake to read too much into this about Foster's life, but it is interesting that in a year when she published four books, she constructs a narrator who complains of the low proceeds that writing brings. The novel also has a scene set in the
. The novel opens in 1798, with the description of a mysterious and melancholy man known as Sandford who has purchased an estate in Cornwall. He befriends the local rector, Mr Godfrey, and his two children, Emma and Frederic. The Godfreys turn out to be the family of his sister, who had been disowned for marrying beneath her and who has long since died. Godfrey and Sandford are delighted to find each other, and Sandford undertakes to offer support for Godfrey's two children. Sandford's melancholy is revealed to be the result of a disastrous marriage to a wife who eloped with another man. She took their baby but left behind two older daughters, who then died of smallpox. His wife, long since repentant, has raised their daughter Caroline to be virtuous, and Frederic Godfrey has fallen in love with her, without of course knowing their connection. Caroline's mother insists that Caroline renounce Frederic until her death, and their separation is further complicated by the unscrupluous behavior of Caroline's other suitor, Mr Mortimer, who lies and bribes servants to effect the estrangement of the lovers.
Elizabeth Freke
She had been in labour 4 or 5, five, days, attended by her aunt, her sister Lady Norton, four midwives, Lady Thynne (probably the mother of
, later Viscount Weymouth, rather than his wife the literary patron), and a man-midwife. The latter was convinced the child was dead, and was putting on his butchers habitt to apply instruments for cutting it up inside the womb and so removing it, when my greatt and good God thatt never failed me (or deneyed my reasonable request) raised me up a good woman midwife, who had been recommended by Lady Thynne. She worked for two or three hours to deliver
. The child appeared dead, hurt wth severall greatt holes in his head (made by the midwives' efforts); but he revived to be baptised that evening with her father's name. A month later he was again thought to be dead (and was removed from his mother to prepare for burial), but again recovered. At six months old he had his leg accidentally broken by a nurse who managed to keep this fact a secret for nearly three months, but eventually he recovered from his lameness also. He even survived smallpox at the age of ten.
Ann Yearsley
More seriously, the same period saw her small daughter Jane suffering from the smallpox. With the rash covering the child's body and temporarily blinding her,
wrote, if she survives this night, I hope to possess her a little longer. She later said her assiduous care had enabled Jane to survive with her looks very little impaired.
Mehetabel Wright
The Wesley family suffered from smallpox.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible), this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as well as the conventional virtue of the conduct books. The last paragraph of its preface begins, As we are created accountable creatures we must run the race ourselves.
includes work by herself and eight other women (
—much used—
,
,
,
,
,
—represented by excerpts from almost everything she had ever published—and
), as well as passages on
and
. She includes
's two Rambler essays about Victoria, who is roused from despair after losing her beauty to smallpox when another woman tells her she is born to know, to reason, and to act.
Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
In addition to writing enormously,
worked at running more than one school. She reported in 1819 (the year following her first application for help from the Royal Literary Fund) that she had started a day-school which failed, and was now appointed to the Free School at Braywick near Maidenhead. For this job, which was to lift her out of the evils of poverty and the precarious misery of authorship, she urgently needed to supply herself with decent clothes. She quickly lost the position, however, when her thirteen-year-old daughter got smallpox (presumably because
needed to stay at home to nurse her). Very soon afterwards she was offered the job of mistress of a school at Bray in Berkshire (with a reference from the current headmistress at Whitechapel). This appointment again brought an urgent need for respectable clothes, which this time had to be redeemed from pawn. But
had to resign the position after nine months because she had developed cancer.
Joan Whitrow
After
died of smallpox,
was impelled by God to go from Putney, where she lived, to London proper, and call the people to fasting instead of feasting.
Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick
The twenty-year-old son of
, died of smallpox, leaving her crushed by sorrow and guilt.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
It was much longer than her previous three novels, and its tone, pace, and purpose were significantly different. It depicts revolutions without veering into quaintness or romanticism, and is instead permeated with a sense of historical reality. A gentlewoman whose children die of smallpox experiences a growing intimacy with her estranged husband's mistress, and the two women become involved in the two revolutions taking place in Paris in February and June 1848. The women eventually espouse the Communist cause.
Elizabeth Walker
's account of her own life shows her pride in her forebears and her pleasure in anecdotes from which she can draw a moral lesson. She treats her childbirth experiences succinctly, linking them to her thanksgiving to God for deliverance. She goes into more detail about family illnesses, where medical specifics accompany the words of prayer and religious meditation. She writes what the Quakers would call testimonies on the dead, beginning with her daughter Mary, who sweetly fell asleep in Jesus Christ at the age of six and a quarter on 21 January 1669, after being ill for four days with a sudden, violent sore throat. She touchingly describes the child's piety and her acceptance of the prospect of her own death, recording her hope that Mary is now happy in heaven. Like
she concludes her account of her dead child by turning to the living: Lord I bless thee that of Eleven, for whom I Praise thee, thou hast yet spared me two. The death of her daughter Elizabeth at sixteen and a quarter from smallpox elicits a parallel narrative of loss, grief, and soul-searching, including a story of how the young Elizabeth once feared she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the sin which would not be forgiven. Again
turns to the living: I bless thee that thou still intrusts us Parents to a Child.
Queen Victoria
As an infant, the future queen was breast-fed, and vaccinated against smallpox.
Ann Thicknesse: Biography
Mr Tudor in this text is of course based on
's husband
. He first appears as the husband of Lady Elizabeth, who was as remarkable for his sense and penetration, as he was for every amiable quality that can do honour to a man. Volume two opens with Lady Elizabeth bearing a son and dying a few months later. Her widower's marriage to Euterpe is somewhat clumsily handled: Euterpe feels for the motherless baby a tenderness which she ever after evinced when he became her son-in-law [i.e. stepson]; but little did she then think that such an event would ever take place! After Euterpe marries Mr Tudor the novel calls her, consistently, Mrs Tudor, and the first topic is the way she cherishes her stepchildren, making no difference between them and her own. This slides naturally into one of
's favourite topics: that of the importance of education in shaping the moral life. This volume has minimal plot: the Tudors' first cottage is described in detail, together with the hospitality they exercise there on several occasions. Euterpe gives free rein to her theatrical talent in her domestic life, staging a pastoral mode of leisure activity in which the elder step-daughter, the maid, a lamb and a cow each has a role to play. Other people's lives are discussed and critiqued. The Tudors travel with their three daughters to France, where the two eldest are left at a convent to perfect their French. There the younger falls dangerously ill with smallpox and the elder increases in religious fervour to the extent of choosing to become a nun. This part of the narrative is supplemented by Mrs Tudor's letters from abroad; the closing pages are occupied with an anecdote about the sagacity of a dog.
Catherine Talbot
's father, the Rev. Edward Talbot, one of eight sons of a bishop, and himself an archdeacon, died of smallpox in a notorious epidemic on 9 December 1720, five months before she was born.
John Millington Synge
His father,
, was a barrister from an originally English family which had established itself for generations in Ireland and had until recently owned estates in County Wicklow. He died of smallpox in spring 1872 and was buried on his youngest son's first birthday.
Lady Arbella Stuart
She had survived a bout of smallpox about eighteen months before this.
Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Mary Eleanor had a precocious flirtation, at thirteen, with the fifteen-year-old Campbell Scott, younger brother of a duke. When Scott left school to go into the army, the pair exchanged rings, but soon afterwards he died of smallpox. After him came a string of admirers, one of them a young Italian marchese.
Charlotte Smith
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia, works as a servant, and is painfully humble and submissive; nevertheless the book depicts her education and vindication.
satirises the pretensions of her own sex through the would-be erudite Miss Hollybourn and the literary Mrs Manby, who is given to stealing from other authors, uses cosmetics to disguise the ravages of smallpox, and believes in the teeth of the evidence that she is still attractive to men. (
thought Mrs Manby to be based on
; others have suggested
.) Perhaps most interesting character is the unsympathetic, powerful, problematic Mrs Rayland, a
in private life, who holds the protagonists' inheritance in her grasp. The hero, Orlando Somerive, has a drunken, gambling spendthrift of an elder brother whose father cannot control him, very much in the style of Smith's own husband. Orlando travels with the British army to America; scenes there feature idealised liberty and his friendship or brotherhood with a native American. New York State is given a lush, tropical landscape, in which Orlando is taken captive and begins to write poetry. During his absence Monimia is subjected to emotional harassment and attempted rape; her happy ending leaves her contentedly dependent on Orlando's protection.
Sir Philip Sidney
As a boy Philip survived an attack of smallpox that left him badly scarred—a fact not evident from the paintings of him.
Mrs Showes
seems to waver about how to conclude her story. Statira's disgrace is salved when the count's sister (a nun) tells him the story of a woman, Idela de Toggenburg, who had the fortitude to leave her unworthy husband and enter a convent, although she loved him. This tale causes Harton to entertain, for the first time, the possibility of his wife's innocence. But Showes chooses after all not to give the novel a happy ending on Statira's vindication. Instead Statira, still not received by her husband, re-appears in the story incognita, in the person of Madame Laborde, a perfect governess for her own children. When the children fall ill with smallpox she nurses them safely through it—only to die of the dread disease herself, leaving her husband to the poignancy of his regrets, for the loss of her, whose worth he did not know how to estimate when living.
Mary Martha Sherwood
's mother was born Martha Sherwood and was heiress to £10,000 from her father, a merchant in Coventry and London. Shy, unattractive, marked by smallpox, with no interest in clothes or appearance, she was her husband's second choice after the death of the beautiful young woman (her close friend) whom he had planned to marry. She brought up her children with rigour. Later she gave MMS a prayer-book which had been owned by women in the family for five generations. She died on 20 March 1817, after Mary Martha had returned from India.
Maria Riddell
In the public mind
is remembered primarily as a friend of
. She first met him in late 1791. They soon developed a free-and-easy, bantering, affectionate correspondence. It was not exclusively literary: Burns, for instance, offered advice about Riddell's inoculating her small daughter against smallpox (a procedure which Anna Maria went through successfully not long before her sister's birth). The letters that Burns sent Riddell also contain plenty of gallant compliment, and in poetry he wrote (as he did, however, habitually in poems to women) as if he was hopelessly in love.
, on her side, has been interpreted as addressing him in poetry as my false love, but scholar
, after careful consideration, concludes that there was flirtation on both sides but not love (for one thing, the judicial criticism of Riddell's article just days after Burns's death could hardly have been written by someone who had lost a beloved). Brown believes that each of the pair perceived the other as a remarkable person, and rejoices in the idea of Burns at long last meeting and making friends with a woman who was his peer in vitality of spirit and adventurousness of mind.
Hester Lynch Piozzi
He was never healthy; the trouble was diagnosed as being in his brain. His mother feared he had been marked by the circumstances of her pregnancy (beset by financial worries and disappointed of any inheritance from her uncle). A couple of years later (after Ralph had undergone inoculation for smallpox, with all the aggressive preparation and follow-up which were currently believed in) her fears became more sinister: This poor unfortunate Child will dye at last . . . . What shall I do? What can I do? has the flattery of my Friends made me too proud of my own Brains? & must these poor Children suffer for my crime? Soon after this Ralph died, at twenty months old. Hester Thrale was left a prey to terror whenever one of her children had a headache. Her next baby, Frances Ann, was born two months before Ralph's death and died in a flu epidemic five months after it.
Mrs F. C. Patrick
Finally escaping from France after surviving smallpox, Augusta settles on her Irish estate with her little son, sets up a school, provides work for her tenants, raises their wages, employs her faithful priest (her former teacher) as her chaplain and pays another priest to minister to the parish. However, she struggles with her mother-in-law over the custody of her son. She remains a philanthropic widow when the story ends.
delivers a closing political message which identifies Ireland's problems as economic, and in the power of landlords to remedy. If other landlords would do their duty, there would soon be an end of these violent struggles between the rich and poor which at this time desolate the kingdom. She signs off: So, patient reader, having waded with me through so much prolixity, I wish thee a good night.
Eliza Parsons
This is a story of contrasted sisters, told by an omniscient narrator. Julia Woodville is good while her sister Ellen is haughty and supercilious. Nearly sixteen years before the novel began, their father retired disgusted from court life to the country (a broken-down house near Kendal) with his wife and two daughters. (Another daughter and a son have died from smallpox.) He has a rake's progress behind him, and his wife, once the good orphan Miss Neville, has participated in his return to dissipation and is, unfortunately, a keen novel-reader. The story ends with the expected distribution of rewards and punishments.
Oliver Goldsmith
survived a bout of smallpox as a child, and was left deeply scarred.