Mary Russell was an heiress—ten years the senior of George Mitford, being then in her thirty-sixth year—and just recovering from a recent bereavement in the death of her mother.
She was the daughter of Dr. Richard Russell, a lineal descendant of the ducal family of Bedford, Vicar of Overton and Rector of Ash—parishes adjoining each other and near to Whitchurch in Hampshire—who, as a widower, married Miss Dickers, the daughter of a Hampshire gentleman of considerable property, in the year 1745.
Childless by his first wife, the offspring of this second marriage was a son and two daughters.
Of these the son and elder daughter died in childhood, leaving Mary, who was born June 7, 1750, the sole heiress to the property of her parents.
Dr. Russell eventually resigned the Vicarage of Overton, but continued both his ministrations and residence at Ash, where he died in 1783, aged eighty-eight years.
At his death his widow and daughter—the latter then thirty-three years of age—removed to a pleasant and commodious house in the Broad Street of that old-world and peaceful township of Alresford, a town the houses of which, save the inns, bear no distinguishing name and number, the staid and sober life of whose inhabitants was only relieved by the mild excitements of market-day or by the noisy passage of the mail-coach as, with clatter of hoof-beats and blast of horn, it rattled gaily through, on its passage from London to Winchester or vice versa.
Mrs. Russell only survived her husband for a little more than two years and died on March 8, 1785, leaving her daughter with a fortune of £28,000 in cash, in addition to house and land property. In the admirable introduction to The Life and Letters of Mary Russell Mitford (published 1870, and contributed by the Editor, the Rev. A. G. L’Estrange) we have a pen-portrait of Mary Russell at this period of her life which, in the absence of any other form of portraiture, we cannot do better than quote.
“In addition to these attractions [her inheritance] she had been carefully educated by her father; and to the ordinary accomplishments of gentlewomen in those days had united no slight acquaintance with the authors of Greece and Rome. She was kind-hearted, of mild and lady-like manners, of imperturbable temper, home-loving, and abounding in conversation, which flowed easily, in a soft and pleasant voice, from the sources of a full mind. Her figure was good, slight, active, and about the middle height; but the plainness of the face—the prominent eyes and teeth—the very bad complexion—was scarcely redeemed by the kind and cheerful expression which animated her countenance.”
To this excessively plain but undoubtedly charming and accomplished woman was the young surgeon introduced, “being easily persuaded by friends more worldly wise than he to address himself to a lady who, although ten years his senior, had every recommendation that heart could desire—except beauty.”
She certainly had every recommendation that the heart of George Mitford could desire, for “though a very brief career of dissipation had reduced his pecuniary resources to the lowest ebb, he was not only recklessly extravagant, but addicted to high play.”