Richard Sharp (politician) - End of Life

End of Life

Sharp once considered writing a history of American independence and wrote to his friends, John Adams and John Quincy Adams about this and other matters. He also considered writing a tourist’s guide to Europe after becoming so familiar with continental travel that he was once called 'the Thomas Cook of his day’. In the event his only publication was a slim volume of 'Letters and Essays in Prose and Verse' published shortly before his death.

Towards the end of his life Sharp liked to spend the winter months at his house in Torquay (Higher Terrace) where he was able to look out to sea and no doubt think fondly of his birthplace in Newfoundland. He had suffered all his life with a cough and a bad chest and Torquay was noted for both its health-giving air and Italianate landscape, but in 1834 the winter was particularly severe and as Sharp succumbed he resolved that he would die in his beloved London. He set off for the city with his family and servants but only got as far as Dorchester before expiring at the coaching inn there. Fearful that a nephew might obtain and subvert his Will, we are told that 70-year-old George Philips, in a final act of kindness, set off on his horse Canon and rode through the night as fast as he could to ensure that this did not occur!

Richard 'Conversation' Sharp never married but in about 1812 he adopted an infant, Maria Kinnaird, who had been orphaned by a catastrophic volcano eruption in the West Indies. Maria, as a teenager, knew Wordsworth's daughter, Dora, very well and in later life she led an interesting and colourful life in London Society. Macaulay and Romilly (son of Samuel Romilly) were among many eligible young men who were said to be enamoured of Maria but in 1835 she married Thomas Drummond, who later became Undersecretary for Ireland. In the same year, Sharp died at Dorchester.