Mary Birkett Card (1774-1817)

Biography

Mary Birkett was born in Liverpool, the eldest of thirteen children born to William Birkett, a soap boiler and tallow chandler, and his wife Sarah, née Harrison, the daughter of a Kendal shoemaker. In 1784 the family moved to Dublin, joining other relatives already in business there. Tragically, nine of Mary's siblings died in childhood. Three succumbed, probably to scarlet fever, in March 1787, with Mary poignantly expressing her grief in a short poem on each death. There is no record of Mary's education, but her childhood poems show her to have been well read. A Poem on the African Slave Trade, written when she was only seventeen, is full of classical allusion.

It is likely that some of her enthusiasm for the anti-slavery cause derived from the involvement of her uncle: her mother's brother George Harrison. He had become a wealthy merchant and banker in London, influential in the Society of Friends, or Quakers. His wife Susannah was the daughter of William Cookworthy of Plymouth, the Quaker chemist who discovered china clay, thus establishing the English porcelain industry. Harrison was one of six Quakers who set up the first association in England to work against the slave trade in 1783. In 1787 this group joined with Thomas Clarkson and others to form the London Abolition Committee, the main organisation that worked with William Wilberforce to abolish the trade. That year, Harrison was one of eight members on the sub-group that created the seal used as the template for Josiah Wedgwood's famous medallion, featuring a kneeling African in chains holding up his hands in supplication with the words 'Am I Not a Man and A Brother?' (Jennings, p.39). This design became a distinctive emblem in the campaign, featured on jewellery and other items used or worn to denote support for abolition. Harrison worked devotedly for the cause for most of his life, continuing as an active member of the Committee right up to the final meeting for which minutes exist in 1819 (Jennings, p.122). Mary's family maintained close links with the Harrisons. She stayed with them in London in 1794, forging a friendship with George's daughter, Lydia.

Mary's poem was written at a particular juncture in the abolition campaign. Publication of Parts I and II may have coincided with the passage of the 1792 Abolition Bill through the House of Commons in April and the Lords in May/June – Part II contains an address to members of the House of Lords. At this point, George Harrison published an Address to the Right Reverend the Prelates of England and Wales on the Subject of the Slave Trade. Furthermore, by 1792 abstention had really come into its own as an abolitionist tactic. In 1791, William Fox, a Baptist, had published An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West Indian Sugar and Rum. Other pamphlets advocating abstention were published or reprinted in Dublin in 1792. Thousands gave up sugar in their tea and boycotted other slave-produced goods, including people Mary knew in Ireland. One original contribution of her poem is the way she appeals to women's sense of solidarity as 'sisters', utilising the contemporary construction of 'woman' as the tender sex to argue that this sensibility, far from excusing inaction, entails greater responsibility. Women are not innocent or powerless - they have an 'important share' in causing slaves' suffering through their own consumption, and power to effect change by refusing slave-produced goods and influencing their menfolk to do the same.

Later in the 1790s, Mary's ideas on education, politics, and religion were much influenced by those of a Quaker schoolmaster and elder with some views tending toward rationalism and free thought. She does not name him, but it is virtually certain he was Abraham Shackleton, headmaster of a well-known school at Ballitore, which Edmund Burke had attended, forming a lifelong friendship with Abraham's father, Richard. Abraham Shackleton became a key figure in a bitter controversy, initially about the authority of scripture, which divided conservative and evangelical Quakers in Ireland from those of a more liberal or radical persuasion. Encouraged by her mentor, Mary immersed herself in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosophes, and the radical Thomas Paine, but later recanted beliefs she cast as 'deist' in 1798 in a narrative entitled 'Progress of Infidelity'.

In 1801, Mary married Nathaniel Card, a Dublin merchant. The couple had eight children, but lost four in infancy. Mary was deeply affected by these deaths. Sadly, she believed a child's illness or death could be punishment for her sin: sometimes the 'sin' of opposing the will of her husband, or other 'sins' in speech that transgressed traditional gender boundaries. This rather challenges feminist assumptions about the relative autonomy of Quaker women. After 1804, she turned increasingly from poetry to religious prose. The Cards frequently experienced financial difficulties, becoming almost bankrupt on at least one occasion, and money worries permeate Mary's journal. Despite these problems, she led a full life, combining domesticity and helping in the family business with philanthropic work, for example in charity schools, and activity in the Quaker organisation. She was closely involved in the life of the Society of Friends. She took on several offices, becoming Clerk to Dublin Meeting of Women Friends from 1813-1816. In 1807 she published a poem on the death of Joseph Williams, a revered Quaker elder. And her interest in antislavery continued. In 1806 she addressed a poem to Hans Hamilton, a Member of Parliament for Dublin County, urging him to support that year's anti-slave trade bill. This was probably her response to the London Abolition Committee's recommendation, in March 1806, that individuals write to their MPs. Thomas Clarkson was asked to make Irish abolitionists aware of this tactic (Jennings, pp.105-06).

Unfortunately, Mary did not enjoy good health in her later years; her journal speaks of a liver complaint. She died in 1817 after an illness which The Annual Monitor, a Quaker obituary publication, describes as 'apoplectic'.

© Josephine Teakle 2006

Works

• A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own Sex. Parts I and II (Dublin: J. Jones, Grafton Street, 1792).
• Lines to the Memory of our Late Esteemed and Justly Valued Friend Joseph Williams (Dublin: R. Napper, Capel Street, 1807).
• A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own Sex. Part I. An e-text of Part One of the poem, available on this website.
• A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own Sex. Part II. An e-text of Part Two of the poem, available on this website.

Works Transcribed from Manuscript and Biography

• Teakle, Josephine. The Works of Mary Birkett Card 1774-1817, Originally Collected by her Son Nathaniel Card in 1834: An Edited Transcription with an Introduction to her Life and Works, 2 vols. (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2004). The Works include a spiritual autobiography and over 200 poems. Works of interest include a 'Soliloquy supposed to be written by Marie Antoinette …' (1793), a description of the experiences of Quakers in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, intimate friendship verse addressed to other women, and poetry written in 1804 at the home of Benjamin Rotch, an American Quaker whaling magnate, in Milford Haven, South Wales. Rotch knew some leading figures of the day – he was a friend of the painter, Benjamin West, and, while in France, had met Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Works in Facsimile

• Kitson, Peter J. and Debbie Lee, general eds. Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), IV: Verse, ed. by Alan Richardson. Part I of A Poem on the African Slave Trade is included. (Biographical information on Mary Birkett was supplied by Josephine Teakle.)

Secondary Works

• Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670-1834 (London: Routledge, 1992). A Poem on the African Slave Trade is discussed on pages 178-83.
• Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth-Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A Poem on the African Slave Trade is discussed in the chapter on 'Sugar', pages 37-51.
• Mack, Phyllis. 'In a Female Voice: Preaching and Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Quakerism' in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998). For mention of Mary Birkett, see pages 248-63.
• Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
• Rodgers, Nini. 'Two Quakers and a Utilitarian: The Reaction of Three Irish Women Writers to the Problem of Slavery, 1789-1807' in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 100C, 4 (2000), 137-57. This article explores Mary Birkett's poem and works by Mary Leadbeater and Maria Edgeworth. (Leadbeater, an Irish Quaker poet and half-sister to Abraham Shackleton, was known to Mary Birkett Card.)

• Jennings, Judith. The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783-1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997).

Links

• A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own Sex. Part I. An e-text of Part One of the poem, available on this website.
• A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own Sex. Part II. An e-text of Part Two of the poem, available on this website.

The Contributor

E-mail: j.teakle@btopenworld.com