Author: Edward Campbell Tainsh
Author: Edward Campbell Tainsh (1835–1919)
Biography: Edward Campbell Tainsh was born in 1835 in London, the son of Henry Tainsh. Little is known of his early life, but by 1868 he worked as a professor of literature in Brighton. In 1868 in Dublin, he married Mary Jane Gray, the daughter of George Gray, the choral vicar of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Thereafter, the couple lived in Sussex and had one daughter (born 1872). By the late 1860s, Tainsh was writing novels, beginning with Saint Alice (1867) about a bachelor who raises two children of a dead friend. The follow up, Crowned (1868), was a religious novel about a chaplain working in a factory. He wrote two more novels over the next five years, one of which was a book for boys. In addition, he wrote one of the first books on the poetry of Alfred Tennyson in 1868 (revised 1893). His wife died in 1892 after a long illness. In 1900, he married Amelia Florence Burden at the age of sixty-six. The couple had no children and he died in 1919. The religious book The Christian Hypothesis was published posthumously in 1922.
References: British Census (1871, 1891, 1901, 1911); pers inf (David J. Murnaghan); Times (15 November 1919)
Fiction Titles:
- Saint Alice, who, however, was no saint. 3 vol. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1867.
- Crowned. 2 vol. London: Smith, Elder, 1868.
- One Maiden Only. 3 vol. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1870.