Hannah Glasse - Later Years

Later Years

In 1754 Glasse became bankrupt. Her stock was not auctioned after the bankruptcy, as it was all held in Margaret’s name. However, on 29 October 1754, Glasse was forced to auction her most prized asset, the copyright for The Art of Cookery. On 17 December 1754, the London Gazette stated that Glasse would be discharged from bankruptcy (issued with a certificate of conformity) on 11 January 1755. In the same year, she and her brother Lancelot repaid the sum of £500 they had jointly borrowed of Sir Henry Bedingfeld two years before.

Glasse once again fell into dire financial difficulties and was consigned on the 22 June 1757 to the Marshalsea debtor's prison. In July 1757, she was transferred to Fleet Prison. No record has been found of her release date, but she was a free woman by 2 December 1757, as on this day she registered three shares in The Servants Directory, a new book she had written on the managing of a household. It was not a commercially successful venture, although its plagiarized editions were popular in North America. Her daughter continued to pay the rates on the Tavistock Street premises until 1758, when it was listed as empty.

In 1760 Ann Cook published Professed Cookery which contained a 68-page attack on Hannah Glasse and her work. Ann Cook lived in Hexham, and was reacting to an alleged campaign of intimidation and persecution by Lancelot Allgood. In the same year, Hannah published her third and last work, The Compleat Confectioner. It was reprinted several times, but did not match the success that Hannah had enjoyed with The Art of Cookery.

The London Gazette announced that "Mrs. Hannah Glasse, (half-)sister to Lancelot Allgood, died on 1 September 1770, aged 62". In 2006, Glasse was the subject of a BBC documentary that called her the "mother of the modern dinner party".