| Main entry | Rogerson, Isabella Whiteford |
|---|
| Birth place | Fair Head, County Antrim, Ireland |
|---|
| Birth date | 3 January 1835 |
|---|
| Death place | St. John's, Newfoundland |
|---|
| Death date | 2 February 1905 |
|---|
| Identifier | 0341 |
|---|
| Birth name | Isabella Whiteford |
|---|
| Alternate names | Caed Mille Failtha; Isabella |
|---|
| Married name | Rogerson |
|---|
| Marital status | married |
|---|
| Religious affiliation | Methodist |
|---|
| Other work | politician's wife |
|---|
| Biography | Born in County Antrim, Isabella Whiteford (1835-1905) began as a child to write verse about the scenery of her native Ireland. She continued her poetic bent in the similarly evocative landscape of Newfoundland when she immigrated with her parents in 1850. Her first volume of poetry, published in Belfast in 1860, includes some of the verses of her youth. This was followed by a second collection published in Toronto in 1898. She married a leading politician of the colony, James Johnstone Rogerson (1820-1907), and joined in his temperance and philanthropic work, which focused primarily on educational and housing provisions for Newfoundland's poor, unemployed, and incarcerated residents. Isabella also presided over the Church Woman's Missionary Society and, for many years, led Methodist classes. Her occupation with caring for her parents and siblings during illnesses is reflected in the domestic and religious themes of much of her verse. Often signing her work under a pseudonym, including "Caed Mille Failtha" which means "a hundred thousand welcomes," Isabella died in 1905 and was buried in the Rogerson family vault at the General Protestant Cemetery in St. John's. |
|---|
| Other notes | Although she had no children of her own, Isabella referred to James Johnstone Rogerson's offspring as her sons and daughters, as is evidenced in her final will. The primary recipient of Isabella's estate, Jessie Rogerson, was also the wife of Isabella's nephew, lawyer and politician Alexander James Whiteford McNeily (1845-1911), making the Whiteford/Rogerson/McNeily family an influential one in nineteenth-century Newfoundland. |
|---|
| Residences | Fair Head, Ireland (1835-1850); St. John's, Newfoundland (1850-1905); summered at "Dunluce" on outskirts of St. John's (1859-) |
|---|
| Geographic regions | Newfoundland; Maritimes |
|---|
| Primary genres | poetry |
|---|
| Books | POEMS (1860); THE VICTORIAN TRIUMPH, AND OTHER POEMS (1898) |
|---|
| Father's name | Alexander Whiteford |
|---|
| Life dates of father | c1790, Fair Head, Antrim, Ireland - 18 December 1867, St. John's, Newfoundland |
|---|
| Father's note | watchmaker; lay circuit steward and trustee for Methodist church in St. John's |
|---|
| Mother's name | Isabella Mathers |
|---|
| Life dates of mother | c1790 - 4 April 1865, St. John's Newfoundland |
|---|
| Mother's note | employed at Reynolds & Co, dry goods supplier |
|---|
| Spouse 1 | Honorable James Johnstone Rogerson |
|---|
| Life dates of spouse 1 | 21 March 1820, Grace Bay, Newfoundland - 17 October 1907, St. John's, Newfoundland |
|---|
| Spouse 1 note | member, Newfoundland House of Assembly; Receiver General; editor of Methodist Temperance Society journal; first wife, Emma Garrett Blaikie, with whom had seven children |
|---|
| Marriage 1 date | 1879 |
|---|
| Biographical references | Story, "Whiteford, Isabella (Rogerson)," DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY XIII, University of Toronto/Université Laval (Web, 2000); REGISTERED HERITAGE STRUCTURES, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site/Memorial University of Newfoundland (Web, 1998) |
|---|
| Bibliographic references | Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), p. 170 |
|---|
| Research references | complete |
|---|
| Image credits | Image from Isabella Whiteford Rogers, The Victorian Triumph, And Other Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1898), frontispiece. |
|---|
| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
|---|