Darling, Sisson Putland (1737–1817), schoolmaster, was the son of Richard Darling (1685–1766) of North Strand, Dublin, and his wife, Anne (née Davis). Richard's great-grandfather was John Darling (d. 1620), protestant dean of Emly (1608–20). The family pedigree gives no clue to any connection with Sissons or Putlands. By the early 1770s Sisson Putland Darling was conducting a mercantile academy at 35 Mabbot Street, Dublin. Among his pupils were John Binns (qv), Frederick Darley (qv) and Theobald Wolfe Tone (qv). Tone refers to him as ‘a man to whose kindness and affection I was much indebted and who took more than common pains’. A fine penman, Darling wrote out ‘in a most beautiful hand’ (according to William Tone) the catholic committee's certificate to Tone in April 1793, engrossed documents for Dublin corporation and could well have helped to form Tone's own neat hand. The academy was moved about 1785 to the Strand.
About 1792 Darling gave up teaching to become the Dublin collector of the Grand Canal Company, a position he held until his death. During the 1780s he was a member of the independent Dublin corps of Volunteers. He was a freemason ‘who at the close of the eighteenth century was the leading exponent of Masonic ritual’ (Lepper and Crosslé). In his politics he seems to have been a liberal. Sisson Putland Darling died, aged eighty, at Grand Canal Harbour, James's Street, on 25 September 1817 and was buried in St James's churchyard. His marriage, on 31 October 1769, to Martha, daughter of the Rev. Michael Heatley of Co. Wexford, produced three sons, George, Richard and Charles (1783?–1804). Richard Darling (1771?–1820), a Dublin merchant, was a grandfather of John Lindsay Darling (1848?–1911), rector of Kinsale and author of an antiquarian monograph on the medieval church there.