was consequently transported in August, ‘at the request of her friends, to New England.’ According to the ‘Annual Register’ for 1761, p. 179, she came back to this country at the expiration of her sentence to receive a legacy of 500l., left to her three years before by an old lady of Newington Green. According to later accounts, however (Gent. Mag. xliii. 413), she never returned, but died 22 July 1773 at Weathersfield in Connecticut. In ‘Notes and Queries’ for 24 March 1855 it is further stated, upon the authority of contemporary American newspapers (which give the month of death as June), that she had married abroad, her husband's name being Treat. Caulfield, in his sketch of her (Remarkable Persons, iii. 148), says that Mr. Treat was ‘an opulent quaker,’ and adds that ‘for some time she [Canning] followed the occupation of a schoolmistress.’ But how from 1 Jan. 1753 to the 29th of that month she did really spend her time is a secret that has never to this day been divulged. ‘Notwithstanding the many strange circumstances of her story, none is so strange as that it should not be discovered in so many years where she had concealed herself during the time she had invariably declared she was at the house of Mother Wells’ (Gent. Mag. ut supra).
[A full account of the above case is to be found in Howell's State Trials, 1813, xix. 262–275, 285–691, and 1418. The Gent. Mag. for 1753 and 1754 also contains much information, and a plan (xxiii. 306–7) of Wells's house at Enfield. Cf. also Genuine and Impartial Memoirs of Elizabeth Canning, 1754; Caulfield's Remarkable Persons, 1820, iii. 108–48 (which includes a portrait); Paget's Paradoxes and Puzzles, 1874, pp. 317–36; and Notes and Queries, ut supra. There are also innumerable pamphlets in the case besides Fielding's and Hill's. Sir Crisp Gascoyne published an Enquiry into the Cases of Canning and Squires, 1754; Allan Ramsay, the painter, in a Letter from a Clergyman to a Nobleman, 1753, wrote ably on the subject, and a surgeon named Dodd issued a Physical Account. Many other tracts, however, such as Canning's Farthing Post, Canning's Magazine, and the like, are eagerly sought after by collectors.]
CANNING, GEORGE (1770–1827), statesman, was born in London on 11 April 1770. His family, which claimed descent from William Canynges of Bristol [q. v.], was at one time seated at Bishops Canning in Wiltshire, and afterwards at Foxcote in Warwickshire. A cadet of the family obtained the manor of Garvagh in Londonderry from Elizabeth, and died there in 1646. The statesman's father, George Canning, was the eldest of three brothers, sons of Stratford Canning of Garvagh (1703–1775), and, according to one report, was disinherited by his father in consequence, it seems, of some early attachment of which the family disapproved. He came to London in 1757 with an allowance of 150l. a year, was called to the bar in 1764, wrote for the papers, published a translation of the ‘Anti-Lucretius’ (1766) and a collection of poems (1767). In 1768 he married Mary Anne Costello, a young lady of great beauty, but without any fortune, and, sinking under the burden of supporting himself and his family, died of a broken heart 11 April 1771. His second brother, Paul, had a son George (1778–1840), created baron Garvagh of Londonderry in the Irish peerage in 1818. The youngest, Stratford, was a banker in London, and the father of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe [see Canning, Stratford].
After her husband's death his widow went upon the stage, and was twice married, her second husband being Redditch, an actor, and her third a Mr. Hunn, a linendraper of Plymouth, whom she also outlived for many years. She never achieved any great success in her profession, and finally quitted it in 1801, when Canning, who had then been under-secretary of state for five years, arranged to have his pension of 500l. a year settled on his mother and sisters.
Mrs. Canning had two children, a boy and a girl, and when the former was eight years old her brother-in-law, the banker, took him into his own house, and educated him as his own son. He was sent to school in London, and afterwards to the Rev. Mr. Richards, at Hyde Abbey, near Winchester, and finally to Eton, where he soon distinguished himself for his wit, his scholarship, and his precocious powers of composition. In concert with his friends John and Robert Smith, Hookham Frere, and Charles Ellis, he brought out a school magazine, called the ‘Microcosm,’ which attracted sufficient attention to induce Knight, the publisher, to pay the young editor fifty pounds for the copyright—in all probability the first copy money ever yet paid to a schoolboy. Canning always loved Eton, and in 1824 was ‘sitter’ in the Eton ten-oar, the post of honour reserved for distinguished old Etonians. In October 1788 he went up to Christ Church, where he made the acquaintance of Jenkinson (afterwards Lord Liverpool), Sturges Bourne, Lord Granville, Lord Morley (then Lord Boringdon), Lord Holland, and Lord Carlisle, and extended his classical reputation by gaining the chancellor's prize for Latin verse, the subject for that year, 1789, being the ‘Pilgrimage to Mecca.’ In the following year he took his bachelor's degree, and entered himself at Lin-
