Author: Anstice, Joseph
Biography:
ANSTICE, Joseph (1808-36: ODNB)
He was born on 21 Dec. 1808 at Madeley Wood Hall, Madeley, Shropshire, and baptised on 21 Jan. 1809, the son of William Anstice (1781-1850), master of the local ironworks, and his wife Penelope Poole (1772-1857), who had married at Enmore, Somerset, in 1806. His mother was the cousin of Tom Poole, Coleridge’s friend. He was educated at Enmore school by his uncle John Poole, the Rector, former fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and author of The Village School Improved (1812). He proceeded to Westminster in 1822 (King’s Scholar 1823, Captain of School 1826) and thence to Christchurch, Oxford in 1827 (BA 1831, MA 1835) where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poemRichard Coeur de Lion (1828) and gained a double first in Classics and Mathematics in 1830. William Ewart Gladstone was among his friends. He married his cousin Elizabeth Spencer Ruscombe Poole (1811-89) on 10 Jul. 1832 at St. Mary’s, Bridgwater. She became a close friend of Sara Coleridge (q.v.) who addressed a poem to her. She assisted Anstice in his Selections from the Choric Poetry of the Greek Dramatic Writers (1832). They had four children, two of whom died in their first year. He was appointed the first Professor of Classical Literature at King’s College London and gave an inaugural lecture there on 17 Oct. 1831 on the importance of classical literature in liberal education. He won the English Essay prize at Oxford in 1834 for The Influence of the Roman Conquests upon Literature and Arts in Rome (1836). With the onset of what was probably consumption, he resigned his professorship in 1835 and went to Torquay for the benefit of his health. He died there on 29 Feb. 1836 and was buried at the family church at Enmore, Somerset, on 8 Mar. A posthumous collection, Hymns (1836), contained 52 hymns, 27 of which gained wider currency when they were reprinted in John Keble’s The Child’s Christian Year (1841) and in various later collections. In later life his widow lived in Kensington, London, and died in 1889 leaving a small estate of under £500. (ODNB 2 Nov. 2021; Morning Post 12 Jul. 1832, 7 Mar. 1836; GM Jul. 1832, 76 and May 1836, 552-3; Mrs. H Sandford, Thomas Poole and His Friends [1888] 1: 48-52, 2: 275-79, et passim; Sara Coleridge, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Swaab [2008], 32-3) AA