Regency Personalities Series-Anne Seymour Damer

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Anne Seymour Damer
8 November 1749 – 28 May 1828

Anne Seymour Damer

Anne Seymour Damer (Conway) was born in Sevenoaks into an aristocratic Whig family; she was the only daughter of Field-Marshal Henry Seymour Conway and his wife Caroline Bruce, born Campbell, Lady Ailesbury, and was brought up at the family home at Park Place, Remenham, Berkshire.

In 1767 she married John Damer, the son of Lord Milton, later the 1st Earl of Dorchester. The couple received an income of £5,000 from Lord Milton, and were left large fortunes by Milton and Henry Conway. They separated after seven years, and he committed suicide in 1776, leaving considerable debts. Her artistic career developed during her widowhood.

Anne was a frequent visitor to Europe. During one voyage she was captured by a privateer, but released unharmed in Jersey. She visited Sir Horace Mann in Florence, and Sir William Hamilton in Naples, where she was introduced to Lord Nelson. In 1802, while the Treaty of Amiens was in effect, she visited Paris with the author Mary Berry and was granted an audience with Napoleon.

From 1818, Anne Damer lived at York House, Twickenham. She died, aged 79, in 1828 at her London house in Grosvenor Square, and is buried in the church at Sundridge, Kent, along with her sculptor’s tools and apron and the ashes of her favourite dog.

The development of Anne Seymour Damer’s interest in sculpture is credited to David Hume (who served as Under-Secretary when her father was Secretary of State, 1766–68) and to the encouragement of Horace Walpole, who was her guardian during her parents’ frequent trips abroad. According to Walpole, her training included lessons in modelling from Giuseppe Ceracchi, in marble carving from John Bacon, and in anatomy from William Cumberland Cruikshank.

During the period 1784–1818, Damer exhibited 32 works as an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Her work, primarily busts in Neoclassical style, developed from early wax sculptures to technically complex ones in works in terracotta, bronze, and marble. Her subjects, largely drawn from friends and colleagues in Whig circles, included Lady Melbourne, Nelson, Joseph Banks, George III, Mary Berry, Charles James Fox and herself. She executed several actors’ portraits, such as the busts of her friends Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren (as the Muses Melpomene and Thalia).

She produced keystone sculptures of Isis and Tamesis for each side of the central arch on the bridge at Henley-on-Thames. The original models are in the Henley Gallery of the River and Rowing Museum nearby. Another major architectural work was her 10-foot statue of Apollo, now destroyed, for the frontage of Drury Lane theatre. She also created two bas reliefs for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery of scenes from Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.

Damer was also a writer, with one published novel, Belmour (first published on 1801).

Damer’s friends included a number of influential Whigs and aristocrats. Her guardian and friend Horace Walpole was a significant figure, who helped foster her career and on his death left her his London villa, Strawberry Hill. She also moved in literary and theatrical circles, where her friends included the poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie, the author Mary Berry, and the actors Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren. She frequently took part in masques at the Pantheon and amateur theatricals at the London residence of the Duke of Richmond, who was married to her half-sister.

A number of sources have named Damer as being involved in lesbian relationships, particularly relating to her close friendship with Mary Berry, to whom she had been introduced by Walpole in 1789. Even during her marriage, her likings for male clothing and demonstrative friendships with other women were publicly noted and satirised by hostile commentators such as Hester Thrale and in the anonymous pamphlet A Sapphick Epistle from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most Beautiful, Mrs D— (c.1770).

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Regency Personalities Series-Lady Maria Theresa Lewis

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Lady Maria Theresa Lewis
8 March 1803 – 9 November 1865

Maria Theresa Lewis

Lady Maria Theresa Lewis was the daughter of George Villiers and Theresa Parker.

On 6 November 1830, Lister married the novelist Thomas Henry Lister. They had three children: Thomas, Maria and Alice.

Thomas Villiers Lister (1832-1902) married first Fanny Harriet Coryton and secondly Florence Selina Hamilton, daughter of geologist William John Hamilton and his second wife Margaret Frances Florence Dillon.

Maria Theresa Lister (died 1 February 1863) married the politician William Vernon Harcourt, by whom she had a son, Lewis Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt.

And lastly Alice Beatrice Lister (died 28 March 1898) married Algernon Borthwick, 1st Baron Glenesk, owner of the London newspaper the Morning Post, by whom she had a Lilian Margaret Frances Borthwick, who married Seymour Bathurst, 7th Earl Bathurst.

Lister died in 1842 and in 1844 she remarried. Lewis had Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon as one of her ancestors and her new husband, George Cornewall Lewis, compiled his biography. Lewis’s career was promoted by his wife in London society and by her family.

In 1852 Lewis published her first work which was a group of biographies based on the people known to Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, and it was titled The Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon. The book was intended to illustrate the portraits in Clarendon’s gallery at The Grove, Watford.

Lewis’s work so impressed the writer Mary Berry that she left her papers to Lewis (via Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis} so that Lewis could in 1865 publish Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the year 1783 to 1852.

Lady Lewis also edited a novel by the Hon. Emily Eden called The Semi-Detached House in 1859, and she wrote two plays, based on fairy tales, for children to perform. Lewis died in Brasenose College in Oxford in 1865 from cancer.

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Regency Personalities Series-Mary Berry

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Mary Berry
16 March 1763 – 20 November 1852

Mary Berry

Mary Berry was born in Kirkbridge, Yorkshire on 16 March 1763. Her younger sister Agnes, who proved to be Mary’s closest confidant during her life, was born fourteen months later on 29 May 1764.

Their father, Robert Berry, was the nephew of a successful Scottish merchant named Ferguson. Robert received £300,000 in mid-life and bought an estate at Raith in Fifeshire. As the older son of Ferguson’s sister, he began working at his uncle’s counting-house in Broad Street, Austin Friars. In 1762, he married his distant cousin, a Miss Seaton. After giving birth to Mary and Agnes, she and their third child died three years later, in 1767, during childbirth.

Following their mother’s death, the two girls were cared for by their grandmother, Mrs. Seaton, at Askham in Yorkshire. They were moved to the College House in Chiswick in 1770. After their governess at Chiswick married in 1776, the two girls were self-educated. Their religious instruction consisted of Mary reading aloud a Psalm to her grandmother every morning, and one of the Saturday papers from the Spectator every Sunday.

In 1781, the uncle, Mr. Ferguson, died at age 93. He left money to both Robert and his younger brother, William. In 1783, Robert Berry and his two young daughters traveled abroad to Holland, Switzerland and Italy. Mary assumed the role of protective mother to her sister, and a guide and monitor to her father.

Mary Berry began writing Journals and Correspondence while in Florence in 1783, though she would not complete the writing until 70 years later. After a long stay in Italy, her tour was completed by a return home through France to England in June 1786.

Berry and her sister Agnes had a remarkable association with Horace Walpole. They first met him in the winter of 1788, when he was then more than 70 years old. A letter he wrote in October 1788 related how: “he had just then willingly yielded himself up to their witcheries on meeting them at the house of his friend Lady Herries, wife of the banker in St. James’s Street”. Walpole developed a deep fondness for the two girls, lavishing them with endearments and compliments. In his letters, Walpole spoke of both in terms of the strongest affection and endearment, in one instance addressing them as his “twin wives”. He wrote books solely for their pleasure and dedicated other writings to them. It was solely for their amusement that he wrote his Reminiscences of the Courts of George I and II (1789). He established the sisters at Teddington in 1789, and two years later, in 1791, he prevailed upon them to move into Little Strawberry Hill, a house previously known as Cliveden, the abode of his friend Kitty Clive, the famous actress. They lived there for many years.

George Walpole, died in 1791 and his titles and estate were passed to his uncle Horace. Horace became the 4th Earl of Orford. “There is a tradition handed down by Lord Lansdowne”, says the Edinburgh Review, “that he (Walpole) was ready to go through the formal ceremony of marriage with either sister, to make sure of their society and confer rank and fortune on the family – he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure of £2,000 a year.” This did not occur.

In 1779, Mary’s hand had been sought in marriage by a Mr. Bowman and she wrote long afterwards that she had “suffered as people do” at sixteen “from what, wisely disapproved of, I resisted and dropped.”

General Charles O’Hara, governor of Gibraltar, had met Berry in 1784 in Italy, and was engaged to her before leaving England for Gibralter in November 1795. Berry had been reluctant to leave England immediately as his bride. This lead to their gradual estrangement and ultimately the breaking off of their engagement at the end of April 1796.

Walpole died on 2 March 1797 and left both women £4,000 and Little Strawberry Hill House, where they lived. He also bequeathed to Robert, Mary, and Agnes Berry his printed works and a box containing manuscripts, to be published at their discretion.

In 1802 Berry went to Paris and, during her stay, she was presented to Napoleon in the palace of the Tuileries. Returning to France with her sister and father later in the year, she went on to Nice, Switzerland and Germany, returning England in September 1803.

In 1798, Mary published the five volumes of the Works of Horace Walpole from the manuscripts Walpole had left the Berry’s. She advertised the work as edited by her father, Robert, but in reality Mary performed most of the work, except a brief passage in the preface that refers to herself.

Berry then wrote a five-act comedy titled Fashionable Friends under Walpole’s name. Berry and her father and sister performed the play at Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence, until the performance was moved to Drury Lane Theatre in May 1802. The play failed after three nights due to its lax morality.

Other works she published include Walpole’s the Mysterious Mother and another of her own plays, a farce called The Martins, set down in a manuscript list of her writings, which was never produced either in print or on the stage.

In 1810, Berry published four volumes of the letters of Madame du Deffand to Horace Walpole, written between 1766 and 1780, which she annotated herself, as well as those de Deffand wrote to Voltaire between 1759 and 1775. She received £200 for this work.

On 18 May 1817, Robert Berry died, leaving the sisters with very little income. In 1819, Mary Berry brought out Some Account of the Life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, followed by a series of Letters from Lady Russell to her husband, Lord William Russell, from 1672 to 1682, together with some Miscellaneous Letters to and from Lady Russell. The work was published from the originals, owned by the Duke of Devonshire.

Berry published the first volume of her most famous work, A Comparative View of the Social Life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution, in 1828; the second volume, Social Life in England and France from the French Revolution in 1789 to that of July 1830, appeared in March of 1831. It was reissued as a collected whole in the complete edition of her Works in 1844, with a new title, England and France: a comparative View of the Social Condition of both Countries alongside Fashionable Friends and her other writings.

A collection of Berry’s works and letters were published posthumously in 1865, titled Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from 1783 to 1852, edited by Lady Theresa Lewis.

During her life Berry suffered from only one serious illness, a near-fatal attack of bilious fever in 1825. She died of old age around midnight on 20 November 1852 at age 90.

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