Dorothea Primrose Campbell
Poet and novelist Dorothea Primrose Campbell (1793-1863) was born in Lerwick, Shetland, where she lived there until she was in her late forties. Campbell’s father died when she was sixteen, and her mother struggled with a serious opium addiction; so Campbell became a teacher to support herself and her younger siblings, opening her own school in 1813. She also used her literary talents to support the family. Her first book of poetry, Poems, was published in Inverness in 1811 and a second enlarged version of the book was published by subscription in London in 1816. In 1821 the Minerva Press issued her novel Harley Radington, which introduced readers in mainland Britain to the traditions, manners, and geography of the Shetland Isles. And for a number of years (1813-53), Campbell contributed poems and tales to the London-based Ladies’ Monthly Museum under the name “Ora of Thule,” making the most of Shetland’s mystical associations in the minds of metropolitan readers.
Despite her hard work, Campbell spent most of her life paying off minor personal debts in addition to a large hereditary debt that burdened her family. In 1841 she moved to London to take up a post as a governess. Although she seems to have been able to find work teaching in schools or in families for periods of time, Campbell was unemployed for large swaths of time towards the end of her life and seems to have lived in penury. She received financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund and the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution. She died at the Aged Governesses’ Asylum in 1863.
Bibliography
Penny Fielding, “Genre, Geography and the Question of the National Tale: D. P. Campbell's Harley Radington,” European Romantic Review 23 (2012): 593–611.