CHRONOLOGY FOR FELICIA HEMANS AND HER CIRCLE

1753      William Roscoe, future lawyer/banker for Liverpool,
          born to a publican on the outskirts of Liverpool.

1788      Roscoe, "The Wrongs of Africa" Pt. 1.  Numerous poems,
          pamphlets, and petitions on abolition, peace, and
          reform follow from his pen.

1789      Roscoe, "Ode to the People of France."

1791      Roscoe, broadsides, "The Life, Death, and Wonderful
          Atchievements of Edmund Burke. A new ballad" and "The
          Day-star of Liberty."

1793      Felicia Browne Hemans born in Liverpool to George
          Browne, wine merchant, and Felicity Wagner Browne,
          daughter of consul for Austrian Tuscany.

          War with France.  Financial panic "ruins" the Brownes.

1795      Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, called the
          Magnificent.

1797      Liverpool under complete guard against France. 
          Privateering, impressment, and a P.O.W. depot mark its
          war years.

1800      The Brownes resettle in North Wales.  Father soon
          emigrates to Canada where he dies in 1812 [?].

1805      Roscoe, The Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth.

1807      Roscoe, "The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's
          Feast."

          Germaine de Sta‰l, Corinne ou l'Italie.  Immediately
          translated into English.

1806      Prince of Wales visits Liverpool, which returns William
          Roscoe to Parliament for role in abolition of slave
          trade.

1808      Felicia Browne (Hemans) publishes two books at age 14. 
          Poems dedicated to the Prince of Wales and placed by
          William Roscoe whose liberty odes it echoes in a study
          of the girl-laureate ("Genius," "Pity").  Her brothers
          in the Peninsular campaign, Browne writes England and
          Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism celebrating Britain's
          re-engagement with republican values in over 300 heroic
          couplets.  With Robert Southey's The Chronicle of the
          Cid, an early entry in Peninsular literature
          forthcoming by Byron, Scott, Landor, etc.

1812      13 Mar    P.B. Shelley continues a correspondence with           
          Hemans, admiring her poetry, contesting her interest in
          "fatal sanguinary war."  Mrs. Browne finds Shelley a
          dangerous "flatterer" and discontinues the correspondence.

          Felicia Browne (Hemans) publishes The Domestic
          Affections which probes the expense of domestic poetics
          in a context of world war ("the storms of Discord roll
          / . . .from pole to pole").  She marries Captain
          Hemans, veteran of Peninsular and Low Countries
          campaigns.  The Hemanses soon move in with her mother.

1813      Sta‰l visits England to publish (in original and
          translation) De l'Allemagne, confiscated on Continent
          by Napoleon, and to further republican hopes for
          France.

1816      Felicia Hemans, The Restoration of the Works of Art to
          Italy, a triumph on the return of Italian treasures
          from the Louvre: its second edition begins her ten-year
          association with John Murray.  Poet remains in Wales,
          using male connections (brother Thomas, Captain Hemans,
          Reginald Heber, H.H. Milman, Charles Hamilton) for
          relations with publishers.  Byron reads and admires
          Restoration as he leaves Diodati for Italy.

          Roscoe's business fails, his books and art works
          auctioned, later stock Liverpool's Athenaeum and Walker
          Gallery of Art.

1817      Hemans, Modern Greece (anon.), topographical poem
          laments yet embraces history's violent displacements,
          as of the Elgin marbles.

          Washington Irving visits Liverpool: "Roscoe" in The
          Sketch Book.  Sta‰l dies in Paris during negotiations
          for a French constitution.

1818      Hemans, translations from Camoens, and other Poets,
          with Original Poetry.

1818      April     Hemans, "Stanzas on the Death of Princess  
          Charlotte," Blackwood's.

1819      Captain Hemans moves to Italy leaving five boys with
          Felicia; two join him in the 1830s.

          Hemans, Tales, and Historic Scenes in Verse, including
          3-canto Oriental tale The Abencerrage and episodes from
          Sismondi's Histoire des r‚publiques Italiennes du moyen
          ƒge (1809-1818).  Hemans, Wallace's Invocation to
          Bruce, Blackwood's, winner nation-wide competition.

1820      Hemans, The Skeptic, attacking Byron and Shelley, and
          Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King.  Reginald Heber
          critiques Hemans' "Superstition and Revelation"
          fragment as unorthodox. 

          Oct.      Omnibus review of Hemans by John Taylor
          Coleridge in Quarterly Review and, like Blackwood's
          (1817, 1820), welcomes her as an antidote to Byron.

1821      Hemans, Dartmoor, Royal Society of Literature, 50-guinea 
          prize; on conversion of P.O.W. camp to school for
          prisoners's children.  Welsh Melodies, Power; music
          by John Parry; for Eisteddfod by Cymrodorian Society.

1823      Hemans, The Vespers of Palermo and The Siege of
          Valencia. . .Other Poems (plays, Spenserians, lyric cycles).

          Hemans begins publishing in the New Monthly Magazine:
          171 appearances by 1835.

          12 Dec.   Hemans' The Vespers of Palermo staged at
          Covent Garden with Kemble, Young, Yates, Bartley, and
          F.H. Kelly who, says Blackwood's, "ruined her part"
          with "the worst tones of Macready" and (adds the poet's
          sister) died "gratuitously."  13 Dec. Times judges the
          play undramatic.

1824      5 April   Hemans' The Vespers of Palermo staged at
          Edinburgh Theatre with support of Siddons and Scott.

1825      Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary (includes "Lays of Many
          Lands" series).  Other narratives of this period
          unfinished or suppressed (The Tale of the Secret
          Tribunal).

          Roscoe, "A Letter to the Rev. William Lisle Bowles."

          Maria Jane Jewsbury, Phantasmagoria.

1826      Hemans resumes publishing in Blackwood's Edinburgh
          Magazine, to total 75 appearances by 1835.

          Andrews Norton begins publishing Hemans' works in
          Boston.  Reserves profits for her, offers her a
          magazine editorship.

          Aug.  "Casabianca" first appears, in Monthly Magazine
          or British Register.

1827      Hemans, Hymns on the Works of Nature, Boston (later
          London, Dublin as Hymns for Childhood).

          Hemans' mother dies 11 Jan.        
          Jan. and April   In North American Review, Andrews
          Norton and George Bancroft review Hemans' work, Norton
          as "the voice of religious homage" vs. "expensive
          religious establishment."

1828      Hemans, Records of Woman, Edinburgh/London/Boston. 
          Travels to Scotland, receives M.J. Jewsbury in Wales,
          and moves to Wavertree, Liverpool, living first with
          Rose Lawrence.  Later associates, Jewsbury and Henry
          Chorley.

1829      Hemans' The Forest Sanctuary republished (Blackwood's,
          Cadell) with new lyrics (including "Casabianca").

          Maria Jane Jewsbury dedicates Lays of Leisure Hours to
          Hemans.  

          Francis Jeffrey reviews Hemans in Edinburgh Review as a
          female Wordsworth who, with "tenderness," writes of
          "that subtle and mysterious analogy which exists
          between the physical and the moral world."

1830      Jewsbury portrays Hemans as Egeria in her novellas-…
          clef The Three Histories.  Hemans visits Rydal Mount
          and stays at "Dove's Nest," Windermere.

1831      Feb.   In the Athenaeum, Jewsbury anonymously proposes
          Hemans as "speaker" of "a feminine literary house of
          commons."

          April   Hemans removes to Dublin and environs.  Her
          brother George is soon commissioner of police in
          Ireland.  Her connections are the Graveses (whose 20-c.
          scion is Robert Graves) and the family of Archbishop
          Whately.  Through Wordsworth, she places her confidante
          R.P. Graves as curate at Bowness.

          Poetical Works of Hemans, Heber and Pollok published in
          Philadelphia, forerunner of the Poetical Works of Mrs
          Felicia Hemans reprinted 24[+] times in Philadelphia
          and Boston 1835-1867: one of several popular collected
          and selected Hemans in Britain and America.

1833      Oct.    M.J. Jewsbury (Fletcher) dies of cholera in
          India.

1834      Hemans, National Lyrics, and Songs for music (Dublin,
          London, etc.).  Scenes and Hymns of Life, with other
          religious poems (Edinburgh, etc.).

1835      15 May    Felicia Hemans dies in Dublin, of
          tuberculosis (?) complicated by scarlet fever (?).  All
          sons schooled or placed, one in a government clerkship
          at the behest of Sir Robert Peel: Charles Isidore
          Hemans becomes eccentric guide to Roman Campagna,
          George Willoughby a civil engineer in Ireland, Henry
          William a British consul at Buffalo and contributor to
          the North American Review, etc.

          July      Hemans' last periodical appearance is
          "Sabbath Sonnet" in Blackwood's.  

          July      Letitia Landon, "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs.
          Hemans," New Monthly Magazine.

          Sept.     Elizabeth Barrett, "Stanzas Addressed to Miss
          Landon" (later "Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans. .
          .").

1836      Henry Chorley's Memorials of Mrs. Hemans: offended
          poet's sister with portraits of Hemans' pert behavior. 
          Rose Lawrence, a Hemans retrospective in The Last
          Autumn at a Favorite Residence.

1837      Wordsworth republishes "Extempore Effusion upon the
          Death of James Hogg" with final stanza on Hemans ("that
          holy Spirit, / Sweet as the spring").

1838      Letitia Landon, "Felicia Hemans," Fisher's Drawing Room
          Scrapbook.

1839      7-vol. Works of Mrs Hemans begin to appear (-1851) from
          Blackwood's, ed. with memoir by sister Harriet Browne
          Owen Hughes.  

1849      2 June    W.S. Landor, a Hemans retrospective in "The
          Heroines of England," The Examiner.

1894      A.G. Thomas and Charles Villiers Stanford publish The
          Swan and the Skylark, a cantata with words by Hemans,
          Keats, Shelley.

1938      Noel Coward parodies Hemans' "The Stately Homes of
          England" in his Operette.

1946      Elizabeth writes her own "Casabianca" in North and
          South.