Lady Charlotte Schreiber
(1812-1895)
15 July 1861

Volume 4, page 213, sitting number 4922.

Born Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie in 1812, she was the daughter of the 9th Earl of Lindsey. She married, firstly, only three months after she met him, Josiah John Guest, the great ironmaster of Dowlais Iron Works in Glamorganshire. Although he later gained a baronetcy, at the time of the marriage the match shocked London society.  Not only was her new husband a great deal older than her, he was also a dissenter and even worse, he was 'in trade.'  Nevertheless, the mésalliance produced ten children.

After the death of Sir Josiah Guest in 1852, his widow continued to run the ironworks on her own. In 1855 she married her son Ivor's tutor, Charles Schreiber, who was fourteen years her junior.

For fifteen years Lady Charlotte Guest ransacked Europe assembling important collections of playing cards, china and fans. In 1884 she presented the English portion of her china collection, consisting of some 2000 pieces, to the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum), where it is still known as the Schreiber Collection.

From an early age, Lady Charlotte was a devoted linguist. As a lonely adolescent in Lincolnshire she had taught herself Arabic and Persian and when she came to Dowlais she set about learning Welsh, an act of scholarly curiosity which greatly endeared her to the local radicals. Her pioneering three-volume English translation of the mediaeval Welsh tales she called The Mabinogion became a classic of its kind.

Lady Charlotte Schreiber 'of 17 Cavendish-square' died, aged 82, on 15 January 1895 at Canford Manor, Wimbourne, Dorset. She left an estate valued at £24,680.