Author: ADAMSON, John
Biography:
ADAMSON, John (1787-1855: ODNB)
The son of Lieutenant Cuthbert Adamson (1737-1804) and his wife Mary Huthwaite (1752-1807), he was born at Gateshead, Durham, on 13 Sept 1787 and baptised at All Saints, Newcastle, on 29 Oct. He was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and then in 1803 went to Lisbon, Portugal, to join his brother Blythman Adamson, a merchant. That was a formative experience for him; his later efforts on behalf of Portuguese literature and culture earned him the knighthoods of Christ and of the Tower and Sword, conferred by the Queen of Portugal in 1841. On his return to England in 1807 he was articled to a Newcastle solicitor and became an attorney. His first book (1808) was the translation of a tragedy by Nicolau Luiz da Silva (q.v.), followed by translations of sonnets by Camoens (q.v.) and others in 1810. The work for which he is best known, in this vein, was Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens (1820)—very favourably reviewed by Robert Southey (q.v.) in QR. He was appointed under-sheriff of Newcastle (1811-35) and served for many years as secretary to the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway Company. On 3 Dec. 1812 he married his cousin Elisabeth Huthwaite (1780-1852) by licence at Earsden, Northumberland; they had seven children who grew to maturity, and twenty-three grandchildren. Adamson was a keen antiquarian and a collector of books, coins, shells, and fossils. He was one of the founders of the Newcastle Antiquarian Society in 1813 and of the Newcastle Typographical Society which published some of Adamson’s work, starting with his edition of Cheviot in 1817. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Pre-eminent among the catalogues of his collections was the one of his library, the Bibliotheca Lusitana (1836), but the library was almost entirely destroyed by fire in 1849. His wife Elizabeth died in Oct. 1852. Adamson himself suffered from gout but insisted on a final birthday excursion on 13 Sept. 1855, when he and two old friends visited the Crystal Palace in London. After becoming seriously ill at home at 9, Victoria Terrace, Jesmond Road, Newcastle, on 24 Sept., he died on the 27th and was buried at Jesmond cemetery. (ODNB 5 Feb. 2024; ancestry.com 5 Feb. 2024; findmypast.com 5 Feb. 2024; Carlisle Journal 5 Oct. 1855; George Willis, Willis’s Current Notes [1856], 78-9) HJ