Lucy Swift (1771–1792)
Lucy Hardcastle (1793–1834)
Botanist and school teacher. Daughter of Lamech Swift of Derby, clerk to the collector of excise, and his wife, Dorothy Kinder, who married in Derby in 1770. Her education alongside Mary and Susanna Parker was supervised by Erasmus Darwin: CD speculated without evidence that she also was his grandfather’s natural daughter. Married John Hardcastle, tea dealer in Birmingham, in Derby in 1792. Her two daughters were baptised in Birmingham: Antonietta (1792–1847), who married William Eaton Mousley in Derby in 1816, and Mary, who married Francis Boott in Derby in 1820. Ran a girls’ school in Derby from at least 1796 until the 1830s. Wrote An introduction to the elements of the Linnaean system of botany (1830).