User:Iley0221/Lady Mary Shepherd

Lady Mary Primrose was the second daughter of Neil Primrose, 3rd Earl of Rosebery. She was born along the Firth of Forth close to Edinburgh at Barnbougle Castle on the family estate near Dalmeny, Midlothian. Her family also rented the Holland House in London. Shepherd had four other siblings. Her older bother Archibald Primrose, had a successful life and eventually became a Member of Parliament and 4th Earl of Rosebery.

She grew up in a family of wealth and money was never an issue, which during that time period, was rarely a problem for aristocratic Scottish families. While her brothers went the local Dalmeny school and subsequently Cambridge University, she instead was taught at home by a tutor. Her tutor, Mr. Pillans, actually offered a much more difficult education, that he was also able to personalize and create a structure just for Shepherd. In her daughters memoir, it states how thankful Mary was for Mr. Pillans and how much of an influence he had on her during the early part of her childhood.

The help and education she received from Mr. Pillans actually persuaded her into finding an interest in Philosophy. It is later confirmed that Mr. Pillans took time to go over subjects like history, mathematics, geography, and even Latin. She was never forced to follow a subject that she did not enjoy, which allowed her to develop a passion on her own. To compliment this style of education, Mary and her siblings were afforded access to constant information through their family’s enormous library filled with at least 1000 volumes in its 1820 inventory.

She lived with her family for most of her life until she married an English barrister, Henry John Shepherd (1783–1855), in 1808 at the age of 30. She relocated with her new husband to London and they resided there for the rest of their lives. She was older than expected for a women to be getting married, but did not settle for a man older than her as Henry was only 25 at the time of marriage. Henry did not have the same burning passion for philosophy that Mary had but was rather interested in drama. For example: The Countess of Essex, A Tragedy was a play written by Henry however, it was possibly never even produced. Their differing interests did not get in the way of their marriage as Mary actually enjoyed the freedom she had compared to other women in that time period. Some people found their marriage to be weird due to Mary putting her career first and Henry not having an issue with it.

The Shepherds had a total of three children, two daughters and one son. Their first child, Mary Elizabeth Shepherd was born the same year Mary and Henry got married, 1808. Next came their son Henry Primrose Shepherd in 1814, and finally their second daughter, Maria Charlotte Shepherd in 1815. Out of all their children, Mary Elizabeth had the most success in her life as she was actually the one who wrote the memoir explaining her mothers life. Sadly, their other children did not follow their older siblings due to health issues. Maria Charlotte only lived to the age of 15 and Henry John dealt with health issues from a young age.

The possibility of an affair between Mary Shepherd and James Bandinel is revealed in the Bandinel Family Papers in a section written by James’s niece, Julia Le Mesurier, to her aunt. Julia divulged the following information in her letter, “when at [?Yundimoor], uncle James (James Bandinel) told my sisters that Lady Mary Shepherd wanted to run off with him, but he said, ‘No, Mary, we are very well as we are. Why cannot we go on so?’ She was so angry with his refusal that she quite quarreled with him & would not see him” (Project Vox Team, 2021).

Although Shepherd's philosophical books only appeared in the 1820s, a memoir by her daughter, Brandreth memoir, indicates that their composition in fact predated her marriage. In the first, an essay on the relation between cause and effect, she criticized the views of David Hume, Thomas Brown and the physiologist William Lawrence. In her second book of essays, on the perception of an external universe, she argued against both the idealism of George Berkeley and Thomas Reid's epistemological reliance on natural instinct.

Shepherd's correspondence shows a continuing interest in philosophical questions. A private philosophical controversy with the amateur philosopher and navel officer John Fearn over the relation between perception and physical extension was published in Parriana (1828). John Fearn called Shepherd "philosophic Lady." After learning of its publication, Shepherd wrote in defense of her position in Fraser's.

Charlotte Nooth dedicated her 1816 novel, Eglantine, to Shepherd.

Mary Shepherd passed away at the age of 69 in 1847 in Hyde Park in London, but not before leaving an everlasting legacy in the world of philosophy. Charles Lyell and William Whewell recognized and described Shepherd as an ‘unanswerable logician, in whose argument it was impossible to find loophole or flaw’ according to her daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Whewell regarded Shepherd so highly as to teach his students at Cambridge implementing one of her works as a textbook. Shepherd maintained connections throughout the philosophical and academic world at large with other influential people at the time such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Somerville, Sydney Smith, and Thomas Malthus.

She was known for her research, writings, and her influence on others within her social groups. Shepherd was known to have a small, close-knitted group of intellectuals that she shared constant ideas with. She influenced her friends like Charles Babbage with mathematics, David Ricardo with economics, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his poetry. She played such an influential role on so many people outside of the philosophical world, as well as in it.

An unpublished poem authored by Samuel Taylor Coleridge regarding Mary Shepherd remarks,

“Lady Mary Shepheard,

As restless as a Leopard

Tho‘ not so lithe and starry,

Did wait on S. T. Coleridge

To learn the extreme polar ridge

Of Metaphysic Scholarship.

With Sall Atticum corn’d

With Paper-spice-pepper’d

With Book-garnish adorn’d

Enter Lady Mary Shepheard

Imbued with a taste for

Prose, poesy, paste

Metaphysics to lull her

Polemics

But what’s that to you?

She is a desperate Scholar

Like the heavens, deep blue!” (Project Vox Team, 2021).

Mary Shepherd describes how her inclination and passion for philosophical thinking is derived from her academic and intellectual upbringing in a letter she wrote to Charles Babbage stating, “I can truly say that from a very early age, I have examined my thought, as to its manner of reasoning in numbers; and from time to time have applied such notices to other reasonings, either for amusement or improvement; — indeed chiefly in order to chastise the vague, illusory, illogical method of reasoning admitted with every part of discourse, whether gay, or serious, & into each department of literature however important its object,” (Project Vox Team, 2021).