Anna Maria Wells

Anna Maria Wells (née Foster; 1795–1868) was a 19th-century poet and a writer of children’s literature.

Early years[]

Anna Maria Wells was born at Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1795 and baptized there (as Anna Mary Foster) on September 20, 1795.^[1] She was the daughter of Captain Benjamin Foster (1769–ca.1795) and his wife, Mary "Polly" Ingersoll (1770–1849).^[2] Her father, captain of his fathers's brigantine Polly from 1791 until 1794,^[3] died (between June and September 1795) when she was an infant.^[4][5]

On October 18, 1800, her widowed mother married Joseph Locke (1767–1838),^[6] a Boston merchant and fish dealer, whose first wife had been Mary's sister Martha. After their marriage, Joseph and Mary Locke lived at Boston and Hingham, where they had seven children, among them the poet Frances Sargent Osgood.^[7][8]

Wells' brother, William Vincent Foster (born in 1790),^[9] died on April 21, 1817 "on the Coast of Africa."^[10] At the time, he was the "master of the John Willis, Schooner, of Boston," "trading with the Natives for ivory."^[11]

Career and family[]

Rev. John Pierpont, drawn by Rembrandt Peale in 1821, the year Pierpont married Anna Maria Foster and Thomas Wells.

Anna Maria Foster and Thomas Wells (1790–1861^[12][13]) were married at Boston on August 6, 1821 by Rev. John Pierpont, a poet, lawyer, temperance advocate, and Unitarian minister.^[14][15] They had four children,^[16] the first of whom was Thomas Foster Wells (1822–1903),^[17] a shipping merchant, raiser of shipwrecks, and father of the mathematician Webster Wells and the architect Joseph Morrill Wells. Another son, William Vincent Wells (1826–1876), wrote a three-volume biography of his ancestor, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, first published in 1865.^[18]

A grandson of Gov. Samuel Adams, Thomas Wells dabbled in poetry while earning his living (from about 1820 to 1828) as an inspector for the U.S. Customs Office in Boston.^[19][20] He joined the Navy in 1834 as a mathematics teacher aboard the frigate USS Potomac and later aboard the frigate USS John Adams. From December 1836 until July 1838, he served aboard the USS Constitution as private secretary to Commodore Jesse Elliott, Commander of the Navy's Mediterranean Squadron, during which time Wells wrote Letters on Palestine, a chronicle of his side-trips to the Holy Land while stationed in the Middle East.^[21]

The couple spent years apart during Thomas Wells's naval service, but in 1842, the New York Herald announced that Mr. E. Marchant would publish a new Boston daily newspaper, the Daily Circular, "edited by Thomas Welles [sic], Esq., assisted by his talented lady, Mrs. Anna Maria Welles, so well known as a valuable contributor to the periodical literature of our country. Mr. Welles is a man of extensive acquirements, possesses an excellent taste and judgment, and has had the advantage of much travel. Under such management, and with the assistance obtained, the Daily Circular can hardly fail of success, notwithstanding the multiplicity of papers within the last year or two."^[22] The newspaper venture seems to have gone nowhere, and by the time of the 1850 census, Anna Wells was living in New York City with her daughter, Anna Wells Whelpley,^[23] the wife of Dr. James Davenport Whelpley (1817–1872), physician, philosopher, metallurgist, and editor and part-owner of the American Whig Review. (At time of the 1855 Massachusetts census and the 1860 Federal census, Anna Maria Wells was back in Massachusetts, living with her son Thomas Foster Wells.)

According to Sarah Josepha Hale, who wrote a biographical sketch of Anna Wells in 1837, "her husband, Thomas Wells, was a man of considerable literary talent and taste; but, unfortunately for his family, he had small inclination for business, and great love for the luxuries of life."^[16] According to Hale, the support and education of Anna Wells's four children "was imposed upon her" and that "she found her talent for music the most available for her purpose."^[16] The historian Sidney Perley suggested that she earned her living as an educator, writing in an 1889 sketch that "Mrs. Wells' chief attention was given to her school for young ladies."^[24]

Hale wrote that Wells, as a child, had a "passionate love of reading and music," and although she began to write verses when very young, she published little until after her marriage. In 1830, she published Poems and Juvenile Sketches, and thereafter contributed occasionally to periodicals edited by her friends. Hale opined that "the predominant characteristics of her poetry were tenderness of feeling, and simplicity and perspicuity of language."^[16] Wells' contemporaries, in addition to Sarah Hale, were Caroline Howard Gilman, Hannah Flagg Gould, Eliza Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney.^[25]

Anna Wells died at Roxbury, Massachusetts on December 19, 1868 and was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.^[24]

Written works[]

• Poems and Juvenile Sketches (Boston, MA: Carter, Hendee & Babcock, 1830).
• The Flowerlet. A Gift of Love (Boston, MA: William Crosby & Co., 1842).
• Patty Williams's Voyage. A Story Almost Wholly True. (Boston, MA: Walker, Fuller & Co., 1866).

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Griswold, Rufus Wilmot (1858). The Female Poets of America: By Rufus Wilmont Griswold (Public domain ed.). Ardent Media. GGKEY:5L03N2GB1RC.
• Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell (1837). The Ladies' Wreath: a Selection from the Female Poetic Writers of England and America, Etc (Public domain ed.).
• Price, Kenneth M.; Smith, Susan Belasco (1995). Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-century America. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-1629-3.
• Perley, Sidney (1889). The Poets of Essex County,Massachusetts: By Sidney Perley (Public domain ed.). S. Perley.