Karen Stapley, Curator, India Office Records, posted at blogs.bl.uk on 15 February 2016:
*”…As a 17 year old Rose, the only daughter of Sir Henry Aylmer, 4th Lord Aylmer and his wife Catherine Whitworth, was known to enjoy walking in the Welsh Hills with Walter (Savage Landor). However a year later in 1798 Rose was sent to India to join her aunt Lady Russell, a decision which some believed to be a move by her family to take her away from this unsuitable suitor. It was in Calcutta that she tragically died two years later…
…‘expired from eating too many pineapples’ was the way in which locals explained Rose Aylmer’s death. The consumption of pineapples and other fresh fruit such as watermelons was at this time believed to have been one way in which people contracted cholera and many towns banned the sale of such fruits during outbreaks as a way of trying to stop the illness from spreading.”
Rose Aylmer (1806), by WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR:
Ah what avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
From To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee:
“Rose Aylmer was Uncle Jack’s cat. She was a beautiful yellow female Uncle Jack said was one of the few women he could stand permanently.”
Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web; Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University, writes at The Victorian Web:
“Walter Savage Landor Dickens, two years younger than his closest sibling, Katey, was the fourth child and second son of Charles and Catherine Dickens. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) was another of those eminent Victorians whom Dickens attempted to absorb into his family’s orbit by naming one of his children after him. A fervid supporter of liberal causes such as Giuseppe Garibaldi‘s campaigns for the reunification of Italy, Landor was imbued with the young Dickens’s passion for liberal and progressive causes, and he highly regarded the next generation of literary radicals, especially Robert Browning and Dickens himself. Dickens had originally considered naming his fourth child “Edgar” — “a good honest Saxon name, I think.” Within days, however, he had called upon radical poet Landor to serve as the infant’s godfather.
Walter Dickens was christened at St. Marylebone parish church on 4 December 1841, after which his father held a celebratory party. The guests included such scientific, literary, and artistic notables as John Elliotson, the editor of the Journal of Mental Science; the poet Landor; artist and illustrator Daniel Maclise; the great actor-manager William Macready, the painter and illustrator Clarkson Stanfield, and the judge and author, Thomas Noon Talfourd.”
Julia Upton 