Appendix E: Biographies
Sandland
Betsy Hewitt Dorlin (bap. 3 July 17921 – Liverpool 9 January 1859) married John Sandland (c. 1785 – Savannah, GA 27 April 1820) in Liverpool, St. Nicholas, on 29 August 1816. While still in England, they had a son, John Dorlin Sandland (c. 1817 – Ashton le Willows 19 June 1880). The Sandlands and young John traveled to America, where a second child, Eliza Sandland (Brooklyn, New York c. 1820 – Manchester 2 November 1885)2 was born. In 1819, they became acquainted in Brooklyn Heights (see Image 42) with Dr. Daniel McNeill, Anna Whistler’s father (see Image 23). They visited the McNeills at “their country residence at Jamaica, Long Island,” where the teen-aged Anna McNeill (see Images 1–5) took the “toddling child” for walks in “the green fields.”3 John Sandland was a commission merchant. Announcements in various issues of the local Savannah, Georgia, newspaper from 1818 until his death show his arrivals there as well as the arrival of cargo for him (whiskey, flour, and sundries). They also indicate that he sold bills of exchange and post notes.4 During one such trip to Savannah, John Sandland died of spasms in Washington Hall on 27 or 28 April 1820, at the age of thirty-five.5 His family returned to Liverpool.6 When Lt. George Washington Whistler (see Images 7–8, 21) was sent to England in 1828 by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along with Ross Winans (see Image 228) and William Gibbs McNeill (see Image 31), they took young John Dorlin Sandland, then a schoolboy, to breakfast at the Waterloo Hotel in Liverpool.7 In the fall of 1829, when Anna McNeill reached Liverpool for an extended visit with the Winstanleys in Preston, she went to stay at the home of Mrs. Sandland until Alicia McNeill (see Image 39) could come to Liverpool to get her.8 In 1843, now married and a mother, she visited the Sandlands again, on her way to Russia, and continued to do so each time she came from Russia to England, except in 1848. During her 1843 visit, John Dorlin Sandland was absent. On Sunday, 2 August 1840, he had left England, not intending “to return for years” (an affair of the heart seems to have been the cause) and spent “more than four years” in the Brazils.9 It eventually became necessary for him to take a sea voyage for his health, so he set out from where he had been living in the Brazils for Para, arriving there in early March 1842.10 In 1845, he published a volume entitled The Wanderer and Other Poems, which he had written during that four-year sojourn in South America.11 The preface to the volume was written in Blakeney, Gloucestershire, in August 1845.12 In the notes, John Dorlin Sandland explained that he had “a Prose Work, now in hand, upon the Brazils and the Brazilians,” in which he intended to write on the subject of slavery, having lived in a “slave-owning community.”13 He seemed to have problems finding employment.14 In 1847, Anna Whistler was in Preston again and visited the Sandlands in Liverpool. She was met at Edge Hill Station (which is on the main railroad line out of Liverpool; see Image 61) by Eliza and John Dorlin Sandland. She went with them to their home at 10 Cambridge Street and saw their mother, Betsy Hewitt (Dorlin) Sandland, who was in mourning for her nephew and niece, John Dorlin Grayson (bap. Liverpool, St. Peter, 31 March 1807 – Roby 1 September 1847) and his sister, Elizabeth (Bessie) Grayson (bap. Liverpool, St. Peter, 26 April 1821 – Roby 8 September 1847), who had died at Roby within a week of one another, of unrelated illnesses.15 They were the children of Charles Grayson and Betsy H.D. Sandland’s sister, Hannah (Dorlin) Grayson. In 1849, after the death of Major Whistler, Anna Whistler and Willie (see Images 27, 30) stopped in England on their way home to the United States and visited the Sandlands again. Betsy H.D. Sandland died on 9 January 1859. The witnesses to her last will and testament were Eliza (see Image 40) and John Winstanley. In June 1874, John Dorlin Sandland wrote a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in response to an article reviewing an exhibit of James Whistler’s paintings and drawings that had appeared in its June 13 issue.16 In his response, he spoke of how he had come to know the McNeill family, of Major Whistler, and of James Whistler (see Images 24–29) as an artist whose genius had now been recognized by the public.17 As a source for his own personal biography, the article makes clear only that he still made Liverpool his home. He said in it, too, that he had received from James Whistler photographs of paintings by James, executed when, after his Paris years of study, he had taken a trip around the world “with a party of friends in a yacht.”18 John Dorlin Sandland worked as a bookkeeper. He never married. He died intestate in Ashton le Willows, Lancashire, on 19 June 1880. Eliza Sandland married Thomas Boyd the Younger (c. 1821 – Stockport Etchells, Cheshire 28 April 1874), iron merchant, on 21 June 1849 in Liverpool, St. Bride’s.19 They had five surviving children: Thomas Albert (Windsor, Liverpool 9 November 1853 – Antigua, West Indies 1 December 1879), John Sandland (bap. Windsor, Liverpool 10 June 1855 – Salford District, June Qtr. 1873), James Charles (bap. Windsor, Liverpool 31 May 1857 – Salford District, June Qtr. 1890), Eliza Mary (bap. Windsor, Liverpool 9 October 1859 – Ryde, IOW, 10 September 1936), and George Herbert (bap. Salford 1 March 1863 – Broadstairs, Kent 26 March 1932).20 Anna Whistler referred in her correspondence to the poverty in which the Boyds were living in the 1870s.21
Notes
1 IGI for Lancashire.
2 The 1881 Census for Broughton, Municipal Borough of Salford, Ecclesiastical Parish of St. John, gives Eliza (Sandland) Boyd’s birthplace as Brooklyn New York US (RG 11/3956, fol. 34, p. 18, PRO). Her place and date of death are given in her will (York Probate Sub-Registry).
3 J.D.S., “James A. Whistler, the Artist,” Pall Mall Gazette, June 1874. It has not been possible to locate the June issue in which this article was said to have appeared.
4 Columbian Museum and Savannah Daily Gazette, March 10, 1818; April 6, 1818; January 7, 1819; January 28, 1819; April 8, 1819; February 21, 1820; February 24, 1820; March 23, 1820; and March 24, 1820. The Entry of Marriage for Thomas Boyd and Eliza Sandland, John Sandland’s daughter, shows that her (deceased) father’s occupation was “merchant” (certified copy of an Entry of Marriage for Thomas Boyd and Eliza Sandland, June 21, 1849, St. Bride’s Church in the Parish of Liverpool, GRO).
5 J.D.S., “Whistler, the Artist”; R.J. Taylor Jr., ed., Register of Deaths in Savannah, Georgia, vol. 4, September 1818–1832 (Savannah, GA: Georgia Historical Society Genealogical Committee, 1989), p. 50. J.D.S. says his father died on 27 April 1820; the Register says his death occurred on 28 April 1820. Presumably he was buried in Savannah. “The primary cemetery in Savannah from the mid 18th century until 1853 was the Colonial Cemetery, and unless Mr. Sandland was buried in a private cemetery that is almost certainly where he was interred … there is no complete list of burials for Colonial Cemetery” (Jan Flores, archivist, Georgia Historical Society Library to E. Harden, n.d.).
6 In Edward Baines, History, Directory, and Gazetteer of the County Palatine of Lancaster, vol. 1 (Liverpool: Wm. Wales, 1824), Elizabeth Sandland, gentlewoman, is listed at 22 Clarence St., Mount Pleasant, Liverpool (p. 321).
7 J.D.S, “Whistler, the Artist.” The Waterloo Hotel was a “first class establishment in Ranelagh Street” (James Stonehouse, The Liverpool Guide: Its Highways, Byeways, and Thoroughfares, by Land and Water [Liverpool: William Lea, 1879], p. 37).
8 Anna McNeill to Catherine Jane McNeill, Liverpool, Nov. 22, 1829, GUL: Whistler Collection, W344; Anna McNeill to Margaret Hill, Manchester, Jan. 14, 1830, LC: PW, box 34, fols. 3–4; McDiarmid, Whistler’s Mother, pp. 17, 18, 19–21.
9 Sandland, Wanderer, pp. 193, 205.
10 Sandland, p. 201.
11 Sandland, p. 5. He had originally sent the manuscript to a “friend in England” without the intention of publishing it but had been persuaded to do so (pp. 202–203). Some of the other poems in the volume were written in boyhood. A reference to John Dorlin Sandland and his book can be found in Kirk, Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary.
12 Sandland, Wanderer, p. 6. However, the 1851 Census for Blakeney has been searched without success for his name, and he is not listed in the index to the 1851 Census for Gloucestershire.
13 Sandland, Wanderer, p. 199.
14 Eliza Winstanley to Kate Palmer, Preston, 2 Janry 1849 (GUL: Whistler Collection, W1080) implies that his sister was unable to marry partly because he had no work. Eliza Winstanley strongly doubted that he would find any. John’s mother, whose faith in God resembled that of Anna Whistler, was more hopeful:
I have promised to part with my dauther soon my Sister says she knows not how we will live separated so necessary is she to my comfort, but my trust is in God that something may offer for my Son to do then I will hasten to be an inmate with my daughter. (Betsy and Eliza Sandland, Liverpool, April 27, 1849, to Anna McNeill Whistler, St. Petersburg, LC: P W, box 34)
15 Certified copy of an Entry of Death, Registration District: Prescot, Sub-District: Huyton in the County of Lancashire for John Dorlin Grayson, GRO; certified copy of an Entry of Death, Registration District: Prescot, Sub-District: Huyton in the County of Lancashire for Elizabeth Grayson, GRO. John D. Grayson, a shipbuilder, aged forty, died of disease of the heart; his sister, who died of disease of the pylorus, is described as “daughter of Charles Grayson, deceased ship builder,” aged twenty-seven.
16 J.D.S., “Whistler, the Artist.”
17 He also incorrectly stated that Eliza Winstanley was the wife of William Winstanley.
18 J.D.S., “Whistler, the Artist”; Nigel Thorp, “Studies in Black and White: Whistler’s Photographs in Glasgow University Library,” in James McNeill Whistler: A Reexamination, ed. Ruth E. Fine (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 91–92.
19 Certified copy of an Entry of Marriage for Thomas Boyd and Eliza Sandland, June 21, 1849, St. Bride’s Church in the Parish of Liverpool, GRO; National Probate Calendar (UK), 1874.
20 Will of Eliza Boyd, York Probate Sub-Registry; Baptismal Register of the District of Windsor, Liverpool, GRO; Liverpool Mercury, November 18, 1853; National Probate Calendar (UK), 1880, 1932, and 1936; Index of Deaths, GRO; Baptismal Register of Christ Church, Salford.
21 Anna Whistler to Catherine Jane (McNeill) Palmer, 2 Lindsey Houses Chelsea London, entry of Friday 4 November in letter of 29 October 1870, LC: PW, box 34, fols. 71–76; Anna Whistler to Catherine Jane (McNeill) Palmer, 2 Lindsey Houses Chelsea London, entry of Monday 3rd [June] in letter of May 21st [1872], PUL 65, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Toutziari, “Anna Matilda Whistler’s Correspondence,” vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 791n1.
