Author: Anderson, Robert
Biography:
ANDERSON, Robert (1770-1833: ODNB)
He was born at Carlisle, the youngest of eight children of Adam Anderson and his wife Frances Coulthard. He was baptised at St. Mary's, Carlisle, on 4 Feb. 1770 and educated successively at a charity school, the Carlisle Quaker School, and by a tutor (despite his family’s poverty). Aged 10, he began working with his brother, a calico printer, and in 1783 he was apprenticed to a pattern drawer. For five years he worked in London where he wrote his first ballads, set to music by James Hook in 1794 and performed at Vauxhall Gardens. In 1796 he returned to work in Carlisle and, when his father died in 1807, moved from there to Carmoney near Belfast. His memoir records an emotional visit made to Burns’s widow and grave on his journey to Ireland. The date of his return to Carlisle is unknown but he was greeted with a civic reception in his honour and a committee was struck to help relieve his poverty. In 1820 this led to the publication of his collected poems for which there were 1000 subscribers including Southey and Wordsworth. He died at Carlisle on 3 Oct. 1833. A death notice in the Belfast Newsletter records that he was known as the Cumberland Bard and some of his poems were published in the Newsletter. (ODNB 18 Jan. 2018; ancestry.co.uk 30 Jan. 2025; Belfast Newsletter 8 Oct. 1833; “The Life of the Author,” Poetical Works of Robert Anderson) SR
Other Names:
- R. Anderson