Author: Bailey, Benjamin
Biography:
BAILEY, Benjamin (1791-1853: de Silva)
He was born on 5 June 1791 at Thorney Abbey, Cambridgeshire, the son of John Bailey and his wife Ann (maiden name unknown). He matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1816, but Alumni Oxonienses lists nothing further although he was described as MA in 1831 and as DD at the time of his death, 1853. He became friends with John Hamilton Reynolds (q.v.) and James Rice in 1814. Reynolds introduced him to John Keats (q.v.) in the spring of 1817 and they became friends and corresponded. Bailey’s discourse Athanasia (1817) has been taken as the starting point for their well-known letters on imagination He married Hamilton Gleig (1793-1832) on 18 Apr. 1819 at Stirling, Scotland. They had two children. He was ordained deacon (1817) and held curacies in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire between 1819 and 1826. On account of his wife’s ill health, he went to France, where he was minister of a small church in Marseille (1827-9) and wrote the poems published as Poetical Sketches of the South of France (1831). He took up the post of Colonial Chaplain of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in 1832. Shortly after arrival, his wife died at Colombo on 31 Mar. 1832. Maria Jane Jewsbury (q.v.), dedicated to Bailey her poem about Ceylon, “The Eden of the Sea” (Athenaeum 12 Oct. 1833, 311) after staying with him at Kolluptiya. In Ceylon he published, besides the sonnets he contributed to Lines Addressed to William Wordsworth (1835), verses for his daughter’s birthday (1837) and Poetical Sketches of the Interior of Ceylon (1841)--the manuscript of which was discovered in a London bookshop in the 1970s. He is sometimes confused with another Benjamin Bailey (1791-1871) who translated the New Testament into Malayalam in India. He was appointed Archdeacon in 1847 on £2000 per annum but retired in 1852 on a pension of £280. He died on 25 June 1853 at 37 Nottingham Place, Marylebone. There are memorial tablets to him and his wife at St. Peter’s Church, Colombo Fort. (Rajpal K. de Silva, ed., Benjamin Bailey, Poetical Sketches of the Interior of the Island of Ceylon [2021]; ancestry.co.uk 9 Oct. 2022; J. Penry Lewis, Tombstones and Monuments in Ceylon [1913], 19; Aberdeen Press and Journal 29 Sept. 1832; Morning Post 29 June 1853) AA
Other Names:
- B. Bailey