The Birth of Charles John Robinson

Charles John Robinson was born in Farmer Street, Shadwell in 1790. His father, also Charles, was a mariner, and his mother was called Mary, possibly Mary Powell. Charles John followed in his father’s footsteps and became a mariner as well - in the merchant service. In 1809, he married Mary Weston, who according to Reginald Blackwood, continuing diligently to trace the West family from his desk at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, was a ‘public performer’. 

August 31, 1790 baptism record for Charles John Robinson from St. Paul, Shadwell, the mariners’ church.

St Paul’s, Shadwell is marked by an arrow, as is Shakespeare’s Walk to the left. Farmer Street runs parallel. To the very far left of the map is Betts Street, where Charles Jamrach ran his menagerie business. Harriett Wombwell was baptized at St. George in the East, just close by.

But, at the same time, as the docks expanded, Shadwell was also the home for the mariners, explorers, shipowners, shipwrights, and all the ancillary businesses of the time, such as Richard Wombwell’s chandlers’ store. It was thus also a centre of Georgian and Victorian endeavour and capitalism, and its ill-repute as a den of vice and iniquity should not lead to the assumption that it was merely a slum quarter inhabited only by the low-life of the time, and that anyone with an address in the area was by definition an impoverished illiterate flailing away for survival along with the bottom-end dregs of the society of the time.  

Keeping this in mind may even perhaps provide some glimmers of insight into not only the origins of Charles Robinson, but also Richard Wombwell, and, even more so, the independent and detached Maria West from Downpatrick, who on the surface, had no business of any desirable nature to be pursued in the docks of East London.