Surname: Tonkin Forename(s): Sarah Eliza b. 12 June 1831. Nationality: English. VIAF.
Poet. Pseudonym: “S. E. T.” From Manchester. Member of the Manchester Field-Naturalists
and Archaeologists’ Society. Married Joseph Tonkin in 1855. Contributed to One and All. Author of Rostherne Mere and Other Poems (1866). Chambers’s Journal ledger entry for the poem “To a Blackbird,” published on 13 March 1880, gives the
author as Mrs S. E. Tonkin, of Langford Road, Heaton Chapel, near Manchester (NLS
Dep 341/369). Biographical information: Report and Proceedings of the Manchester Field Naturalists’ and Archaeologists’ Society
for the Year 1898, vol. 39, 1899; Chas. F. Foreshaw, editor, Pearls of Poesy: A Biographical Birthday Book of Popular Poets of the Period at the
time of the Coronation of King George and Queen Mary, 1911, p. 184. (AC, CC)