Lucretia Maria Davidson was an American poet of the early 19th century.
Background
Lucretia Maria Davidson was born on September 27, 1808 at Plattsburg, New York, United States. She was the daughter of Oliver and Margaret (Miller) Davidson. Her father, a doctor with cultivated tastes, was barely able to support his family; their mother, who had received the showy, superficial instruction in music, drawing, and belles-lettres then usual among girls of good family, was always in delicate health and was frequently confined to her bed for several months at a time. Seven of her nine children died before her. Lucretia Maria, an intelligent, affectionate, docile child, began to draw and to scribble rhymes in a chi- rography of her own before she had properly been taught to write. She was covered with shame when her papers were discovered and exclaimed over as evidences of unfolding genius. Her mother encouraged the child to write more and bestowed great pains on her moral, religious, and literary instruction at home.
Education
Lucretia was sent at the age of four to Plattsburgh Academy, where she learned to read, and wrote Roman letters in the sand.
Career
When the mother became seriously ill, Lucretia would act as housekeeper; at other times she read avidly and wrote rapidly, occasionally producing four or five copies of verses in a single day and standing, sometimes, rather than take time to sit down to her work. Finding the child’s fondness for versifying was developing into an obsession, Mrs. Davidson forbade her to write altogether. Her daughter quickly grew depressed and nervous, and was allowed to resume her writing. She enjoyed several trips to friends and relatives in Canada; and through the generosity of a family friend, Moss Kent, a brother of James Kent the jurist, she was sent in November 1824 to Mrs. Willard’s School at Troy. There she studied feverishly, but was already hopelessly consumptive and neurotic. The school physician attempted to restore her health with emetics and bleeding, and the ordeal of a public examination took what vitality was left. She was taken home sick, but her father, with the advice of another doctor, sent her to a school in Albany, thinking that she would benefit by the “change of air. ” She died of tuberculosis a month before her seventeenth birthday, her last words being an expression of gratitude to her benefactor, Moss Kent.
Davidson's career closely paralleled Lu- crctia’s, except that she was never sent away to school and that on an extended sojourn in New York she had—what her sister had never experienced—an evening at a theatre. Like her sister she read constantly and almost as constantly wrote verse that is indistinguishable from Lucretia’s. She died of tuberculosis at Saratoga in her sixteenth year. The poetical remains of the two children and, even more, the story of their pitiable, exemplary lives made a strong appeal to the religious and moral sentiments of their generation. Distinguished writers were easily induced to furnish biographical introductions to their poems, and critical eyes suffused with sympathetic tears quite naturally mistook precocity for poetic merit. One reader, Caroline Southey, the wife of the Poet Laureate, even went so far as to address Mrs. Davidson in a sonnet that compared the grief of the mother over her two children to the anguish of the Virgin Mary at the crucifixion of the Saviour. As a matter of fact, the work of the Davidson sisters was what precocious verse is almost inevitably—an echo of the conventional poetic language and sentiment of its time. To the social and literary historian their writings and the full accounts preserved of their lives are of considerable value.