Eliza Inglis

Inglis, Eliza née Scholefield, fl. 1826—1837

by Benjamin Colbert

Much of what is known about Eliza Inglis is at present conjectural. The Leeds Mercury contains a notice of her marriage to the journalist and writer, Henry David Inglis (1795-1835; ODNB), on 27 April 1826 at Leeds. She is identified as ‘Miss Scholefield, of Carr-Place’, and could be the daughter of (or related to) the solicitor, Thomas Scholefield, who resided at 6 Carr Place at that time (Parson 111).

After her marriage, Eliza Inglis resided with her husband chiefly in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, where he edited the Chesterfield Gazette while writing books based on the travels of his earlier youth. Whether she accompanied him on his renewed travels from the spring of 1830 is another matter of conjecture, but if so she would have toured France, Switzerland, the Pyrenees, and Spain over the next year and a half. From 1832 to 1834, they were settled in the Channel Islands, where Henry David Inglis resumed his journalistic career, editing the Jersey British Critic. A likely relation of Eliza Inglis and former president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, Matthew Scholefield, M.D., also resided on Jersey at this time and maintained a medical practice there. Scholefield contributed a chapter to H.D. Inglis’s The Channel Islands (1834) and, with one Sarah Scholefield, was witness to Inglis’s last will and testament in February 1835.

In summer 1834, the Inglises toured Ireland, as H.D. Inglis acknowledged in his Journey throughout Ireland (1834): ‘In most of my voyages of discovery, among the mountains and valleys, as well as in the suburbs of the towns, I was accompanied by my wife’ (2: 290-91). The pace of work in publishing this volume must have been frenetic and some put his early death on 20 March 1835 down to this (Sydney). Eliza Inglis next appears as the self-effacing editor of her husband’s last work, Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote (1837), a blend of factual material from Spain in 1830 within a fictional frame. The illustrator of the volumes, George Cruikshank, corresponded with Eliza Inglis, at first mistaking her for ‘The Authoress’ (Patten 544n106).

After the publication of Rambles, Eliza Inglis fades into obscurity.

Sources:

Inglis, Henry David. A Journey throughout Ireland, during the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834. 2 vols. London: Whittaker & Co., 1834. Print.

The Leeds Mercury, no. 3173 (Sat., 6 May 1826). Gale Databases: British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900. Web. 26 May 2020.

Parson, William, comp. General and Commercial Directory of the Borough of Leeds. Leeds: Printed and Published at the Mercury-Office, by Edward Baines, 1826. Print.

Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art. 2 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Print.

Sydney, W. C., and Elizabeth Baigent. ‘Inglis, Henry David (1795-1835), traveller and writer’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 27 May 2010. Oxford University Press. Web. 26 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14400

‘Will of Henry David Inglis, Gentleman of London’. PROB 11/1846/479. Natl. Archives, London.

[see updates]