Today in the History of Love. In 1790, the 26-year-old London architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe—later the designer of the U. S. Capitol, he has been called “the father of American architecture”—married the 19-year-old Lydia Sellon, the daughter of a well-known and wealthy clergyman, William Sellon. (Note that this Lydia Sellon is not the famous nineteenth-century religious reformer named Lydia Sellon, though the later Lydia was the great-granddaughter of the earlier Lydia’s father.)
B. Henry Latrobe (as he signed himself) was born in 1764 in Leeds, Yorkshire, to the leader of the Moravian sect in England; his mother (Margaret Antes) was a well-to-do American from the Moravian community that built Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1776, at age 12, Henry was sent to a Moravian school in Silesia and was probably meant for the ministry (he spoke five modern languages, plus Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.) But as he kicked around the Continent for eight years, Henry acquired a wide range of knowledge in the arts and sciences, and he became more than a bit of a philosophe. Returning to England at age 20, he was apprenticed to the great civil engineer John Smeaton, then worked in the office an architect. At the same time, Henry and his older brother Christian (definitely a minister, as well as a significant composer of sacred music) mingled with London’s “Enlightened” set, not least the anti-slavery set in which Moravians were notable.
Sometimes in 1789, Henry asked the Reverend William Sellon for the hand of his favorite daughter, Lydia (three years his senior), and was heartily welcomed for his character, intelligence, and demeanor. Her mother was eventually brought around. But half of Lydia’s siblings focused on Henry’s lack of wealth and were against the match—especially because the Reverend Sellon planned to provide well for his daughter and her children, which meant less for them. Henry himself was forced to sit through Sellon family councils during which his suitability was analyzed. (In the event, the Reverend Sellon’s provision for Lydia’s children became the responsibility of two sons opposed to the match and was never fulfilled.)
On February 27, 1790, the couple were married at her father’s London church: St. James Church, Clerkenwell. The marriage was happy but brief. Lydia shared not only in Henry’s active social life but (rare for the time) even participated in his professional projects. Lydia bore her first child (Lydia) in March 1791; her second (Henry) in November 1792; but died in childbirth, along with her third child, in November 1793. By then England was at war with France, and building projects were scarce, particularly for architects of known “democratic” sympathies. These personal and professional blows coming together crushed Henry, and he decided to move to his mother’s country, which had become the United States of America.
Quotation of the day. “Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.” Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi.”
Word of the Day. Mizpah (Hebrew); an emotional bond between people who are separated, either physically or by death. The word means “watchtower,” and comes from Genesis 31: 49. Mizpah jewelry became popular in Victorian times.
Poem of the Day. Henry Latrobe was a man of many parts, as Enlightenment figures so often were. His father was friends with Dr. Johnson; his brother, with Joseph Haydn. “Men of genius” one diarist called the three Latrobes. But a poet, Henry was not. Nevertheless, the month after Lydia died, Henry wrote an ode called “Solitude,” in which he expressed the hope that his children’s need for him might stir him to pick up his shattered life.
But come, ye pledges of our spotless love,
Where the young violet buds upon her sod,
Kneel by your father;—there the present God
To calmer tears his burning eyes may move;
Pour balm upon his widowed, wounded heart; —
And strengthen him to act a father’s part.
A few years later, his children did move to America and became part of its tapestry. Son Henry fought against Britain in the Battle of New Orleans, though he died of yellow fever in that city two years later. Daughter Lydia married into the Roosevelt family (the Oyster Bay, or TR branch).