Death, And Other Poems by Fry, Caroline - 1823

London: Ogle, Duncan, & Co, 1823. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Very Good; Some marginallia in pencil.. 12mo 7" - 7½" tall. Original drab boards with paper title label to spine. Fry [married name Wilson], Caroline (1787-1846) , author, was born in a house opposite the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells on 31 December 1787. She was the sixth daughter and youngest but one of the ten children of John Fry, a gentleman farmer. She was taught at home by her boarding-school-educated elder sisters, with the aid of unrestricted access to circulating libraries. Her father's pride in her precocious literary ambition led him to publish her youthful composition, a History of England in Verse (1802). After his death in 1802 the elder sisters' marriages opened up a wider social world to the younger children, but, as an insurance against crumbling family finances, Caroline was sent, at age seventeen, to spend fifteen months at a good London school. Some of her family, meanwhile, had abandoned the high-and-dry Anglicanism of their upbringing for more fervent evangelical piety. Caroline, however, was attracted by the introduction to London society afforded by a post as companion to the family of a rich Bloomsbury solicitor. Three years there taught her the social wisdom of concealing a reputation for cleverness, and brought about a recurrence of her childhood tendency to 'nervous depression'. A spell with a Lincolnshire clergyman's family in her mid-twenties led Caroline Fry to feel dissatisfied with her prospects; this brought about a return to her childhood enthusiasm for Edward Young's Night Thoughts and an evangelical conversion, the progress of which she described at the conclusion of her Autobiography (1848) , a posthumously published account, in the third person, of the early 'history of her mental and spiritual existence'. The letters appended show that access to London society enabled her to discuss famous preachers and attend the May meetings of the missionary societies, where she was an astute observer of the millenarian debate of the mid-1820s and of the growing rift between Edward Irving and his former flock. Resuming her versifying skills she published three slim volumes (1821-3) of moralizing poems and hymns of the vanitas vanitatum school. Illness prompted Caroline Fry to turn to writing as a means of earning a living. In 1823, having first secured aristocratic patronage, she launched the Assistant of Education, Religious and Literary (10 vols. , 1823-8) , intended for children aged between ten and sixteen. The monthly order placed by the Royal Library, on the recommendation of Bishop Charles Sumner, was a measure of her success. Editorial essays, offering moral and religious reflections upon the domestic mores of upper-class society, subsequently enjoyed success in anthologized form as The Listener (2 vols. , 1830; 13th edn, 1863; Philadelphia, 1849; trans. , Paris, 1844) and Gatherings (1839). In December 1827 Caroline Fry's continuing social acceptability was marked by her sitting for one of Lawrence's last female portraits: despite her pose as a substantial but languorous Regency beauty, with averted gaze, the determined chin is not disguised. The heated religious debate of this period favoured books prepared to offer authoritative definitions of the beliefs of an 'out-and-out Evangelical, a Low Churchman, a Calvinist'. The preface to the cheap edition of Caroline Fry's Christ our Example (1832, 1867) claimed that evangelical scholars and theologians alike recognized this as 'the best book of its kind'. The recommendation by the Methodist Times that it should be adopted as a textbook for class meetings resulted in 27,000 copies being printed by 1907. Although she offered the occasional glancing blow at Tractarianism, successive books of a similar kind (1837-47) owed their success to a trenchant delivery, enlivened by sketches from daily life, and nowhere enfeebled by the effects of sentimental piety. Her series of books of prayers and meditations on portions of scripture showed similar characteristics (1828-48). In 1831 Caroline Fry married William Wilson, a merchant, and, despite her Francophobic prejudices, they spent the honeymoon in Paris. By the mid-1830s the couple had settled at The Windmills, Blackheath, before moving to Woolwich in 1844. Her letters suggest that ill health and her husband's limited income curbed their extensive social round, although she kept up her correspondence with the pious aristocracy. The recuperative powers of Hastings were tried too late and she returned to Tunbridge Wells to die of cancer and a 'congested lung' (Fry, appended letter) on 17 September 1846. She was survived by her husband. Elisabeth Jay. Oxford D. N. B. ; 110 pages.