Edward Tracy Turnerelli (1813-1896), son of Peter Turnerelli, was born in Newman Street, London, on 13 Oct. 1813. For a time he studied modelling under his father and at the Royal Academy, but in 1836 went to Russia, where he spent eighteen years, visiting, under the emperor’s patronage, the most distant parts of that country and sketching its ancient monuments. He returned to England in 1854, and, obtaining an independent income by his marriage with Miss Martha Hankey, devoted the remainder of his life to politics as an ardent supporter of conservative principles.

On View (at Hunt and Roskell’s). John Tenniel’s 1879 Punch cartoon depicts Disraeli inspecting the triumphal wreath that was Turnerelli’s idea. Click on image to enlarge it.

In 1878 he earned notoriety as the projector of a scheme for presenting a ‘people's tribute’—in the form of a gold laurel wreath—to [Benjamin Disraeli,] the Earl of Beaconsfield in recognition of his services at the Berlin congress, but the earl declined to accept the gift, and the wreath was left on Turnerelli’s hands. Turnerelli died at Leamington on 24 Jan. 1896.

He wrote Tales of the Rhenish Chivalry (1835), Kazan, the Ancient Capital of the Tartar Khans (1854), What I know of the late Emperor Nicholas (1855), A Night in a Haunted House (1859), and many political pamphlets. In 1884 he published his Memories of a Life of Toil, or the Autobiography of the Old Conservative.

Bibliography

O'Donoghue, Freeman Marius. “Edward Tracy Turnerelli (1813-1896), .” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. LVII, 370. Online version via Wikisource. Web. 24 May 2020.


Last modified 24 May 2020