Biography

Orladmin. “Mary Leadbeater.” The Orlando Project, 27 Aug. 2012, https://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/?p=1655.

by Jazmyne Abraham

Introduction

Mary Leadbeater, born “Shackleton” on December 1, 1758, in Ballitore, Ireland, to Richard Shackleton and Elizabeth Carleton, is considered an eminent woman of the eighteenth century due to her works as a poet, life-writer, and political commentator, although she is most often categorized as an author and a diarist. While Leadbeater has an impressive catalogue with genres ranging from fiction to biographies, she is best remembered for her letters and her autobiography. Her lengthy and successful writing career is a result of her engaging education, high profile friendships, and an educational trip to England, all in combination with her impregnable drive. Despite Leadbeater’s social standing and upper-middle class status, as indicated by the work of her and her family as well as her social circle, she lived a rather simple life with a close-knit family in a fairly small town. In this essay, I will navigate through Leadbeater’s life leading up to her success and following the legacy she left behind. 

Early Life/Family

Mary was the second born of four children, having two sisters and a brother (Luddy, par 1). Leadbeater’s parents, Richard Shackleton, and Elizabeth Carleton, were both from Yorkshire, England, but moved to a Quaker settlement in Ireland called Ballitore, Co. Kildare sometime before Mary was born to work as tutors (Mulvihill, par 1). Mary's extended family, including an aunt and her paternal grandfather, had also settled into this village. Based on letters that have been collected dated throughout Mary's life, it appears that the family remained close throughout the duration of their lives. Richard taught at, and eventually school mastered, the Ballitore Boarding School and Elizabeth was the matron (Brown et al., Life – Mother). Both Mary’s mother and father played a significant role in her talents as her father was an academic and scholar himself and her mother had a fine hand in the arts, including writing letters of which Mary compiled later in life (Brown et al., Life – Mother & Father). The Shackleton line were members of the Quakers, and a community was built by like-minded individuals in Ballitore (Mulvihill, par. 1). Quakers, who were not associated with the Church of England, shared a common belief that God loves, teaches, and lives in everyone, focusing their faith on present life as opposed to the afterlife. These were the set of values that Mary and her family subscribed to. Ballitore, which was the first organized quaker settlement in Ireland, was a well-established village with “its own boarding-school, post-office, religious Meeting House, farms, and cemetery” (Mulvihill, par. 1). The Quakers highly valued education and work ethic, which was reflected in the development of the village. The Shackleton’s were no exception. 

Education

Being that in order to attend most academic institutions, such as Oxford, you needed to be associated with the Church of England, dissenter groups were left to develop their own education systems. Mary was the first, and at the time only female student attending Ballitore Boarding School, which was founded in 1727 by her paternal grandfather, Abraham Shackleton, and head mastered by her father by 1756 (Brown et al., Life – Education; Mulvihill, par. 2). What started as a school with less than forty children enrolled gradually became a well-respected institution with children rolling in from London, France, Norway, and Jamaica. The school offered an excellent education, resulting in its growing reputation. It is suspected that Mary was able to read and write by the time she was only four years old and began keeping a diary of which she’d write in every day at the age of eleven. Scholar Alborough Wrightson acted as a mentor for Mary and aided in in her literary studies. In addition to her formal academics, Mary took frequent trips to the library in Limerick to further exercise her proficiency; however, her skills were not limited to literary talents. Throughout her education, it was discovered that Mary was skilled in painting and herbal medicine, the latter of which she likely took up from her aunt, who was the village’s herbal healer. Mary herself was “entrepreneurial and industrious” (Mulvihill, par. 2), much like the others in her village. She took over as the village’s herbal healer, as well as became a bonnet-maker and a homemaker, in addition to her pursuit in writing. A key point in both her education and the trajectory of her career was the lengthy trip she and her father took to England in 1784. During this trip, she visited several towns, including the Quaker village of Selby, Yorkshire, which she details in her journal, Beaconsfield, of which she wrote a poem about, and London, where she was introduced to various artists, including painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, poet George Crabbe, writer Maria Edgeworth, publisher Joseph Johnson, and life-long friend and philosopher, Edmund Burke. 

Social Circle

Edmund Burke was a family friend of the Shackletons as he was educated in Ballitore by Abraham Shackleton (Mulvihill, par. 3; Brown et al., Life – Other Relations). He was an Irish economist, philosopher, and politician, serving as a Member of Parliament in the House of Great Britain. Burke is widely known nowadays as the father of modern conservatism. It is predominantly due to Leadbeater’s close friendship and frequent correspondence with Burke that she earned her reputation as a political commentator. In addition to their abundance of letters to one another, right up to Burke’s death in 1797, Leadbeater wrote several poems throughout her career in relation to, if not directly addressed to Burke (Luddy, par. 3; Mulvihill, par. 3). Edmund Burke was not the only politician of which Leadbeater was in written communication with. She was also in correspondence with French revolutionary writer, Madame Roland (Brown et al., Overview). Leadbeater was in correspondence with other notable pupils too, including the previously mentioned George Crabbe and Maria Edgeworth, as well as fellow Irish writer and diarist, Melesina Chenevix Trench. It is evident that Leadbeater’s social circle was composed of high-profile individuals, of which influenced the content of her writing and contributed to her overall success, partially due to exposure alone. Not only did Edmund Burke write of her and her work, but the contents of her writings were inspired by socio-political events, places she’d been, and people she knew.

Career

Amongst Leadbeater’s abundance of preserved letters and personal diaries, she produced pieces in many genres, including “classical translation, poetry, diary and journal, narrative sketch and tale, improvement literature, children's literature, historical chronicle and annals, letters, biography, and autobiography” (Mulvihill, par. 5). The peak of her public writing career lasted over thirty-four years, and she was most active in producing published works between 1790 and 1824. Leadbeater was successful in Dublin, London, and Philadelphia. The first recorded publication of Mary’s was poetry included in the “second volume of a Dublin anthology edited by Joshua Edkins: A Collection of Poems, Mostly Original, By Several Hands” in 1790 (Brown et al., Writing - Poetry). She published her first book, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, anonymously in 1794. In 1808, she published a collection of poems. One of her last reported works published was The Pedlars, A Tale, which was written for the Kildare Place Society. As mentioned, Mary has been recognized as a political writer, which can be attributed to elements of her diary that detail the graphic violence that took place during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and her pieces directly addressing political issues, like The Negro: Addressed to Edmund Burke (Mulvihill, par 5; Brown et al., Life & Writing - Writing). 

Marriage/Children

Despite her high profile and personal letters and diaries, there is not a lot of information on Mary’s personal life regarding her family. She was thirty-two years of age when she married her husband, William Leadbeater, in 1791 (Mulvihill, par. 4). William was a former pupil of at the Ballitore School. He converted into being a Quaker upon marrying her and was a businessman, farmer, and landowner (Mulvihill, par. 4). Together, they settled in Mary’s home village of Ballitore and began building their family, which consisted of three to six children. It is unclear exactly how many children the Leadbeater’s bore; however, it is reported that they had at least three daughters, Lydia, Mary, and Margaret, with a possible fourth being Sarah (Mulvihill, par. 4). Lydia was suspected to be the “secret patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin” (Mulvihill, par. 4). Being that Ballitore is the reported place of death for both Mary and William, it is evident that the Leadbeater’s remained in the Quaker village for the majority of their lives.

Death/Legacy

On June 27th, 1826, Mary Leadbeater died of dropsy, what we now know as congestive heart failure, in Ballitore, Co. Kildare (Brown et al., Life – Death). Following her death, the first volume The Leadbeater Papers: The Annals of Ballitore, was published in 1862 with the help of her niece, Elizabeth Shackleton. This was a book of compiled writings of Mary Leadbeater, including elements of her diary, unpublished letters with Edmund Burke, Mrs. R. Trench, and George Crabbe. It is through documents like these that Leadbeater’s legacy has been able to live on.