Author: Banton, John
Biography:
BANTON, John (1793-1848: findmypast.co.uk)
He was baptised at Teigh, Rutland, on 2 June 1793, the son of Edward and Mary Banton. He attended the village school but claimed not to have been taught grammar. Nevertheless, like many rural labouring poets, he acquired a fairly good knowledge of English poetry. He married Hannah Cobley at Garthorpe, Leicestershire, on 2 Jan. 1816 and they went on to have three sons. He worked initially as a carpenter but eventually became the local schoolmaster and parish clerk. His first two works,The Village Wreath (1822) and Excursions of Fancy (1824) (with a frontispiece of his cottage which may have irked John Clare [q.v.]), were well received locally. Clare subscribed to both volumes but thought little of "Bantum" and the "swarm" of rural poets that had sprung up around him. Banton’s later works The Sulliot Chief (1834)--a poetic drama on Ali Pasha's attempt to subjugate a Greek tribe--and Gleanings in Carmel (1847) (religious ramblings) were darker and more ambitious but less successful. In the 1841 Census he is recorded at Teigh as a schoolmaster, living with his wife and three children. He died at Teigh on 17 Jan. 1848 and was buried on 21 Jan. (findmypast.co.uk 27 Jan. 2021; Stamford Mercury 4 Feb. 1848; Catalogue of the John Clare Collection [Northampton Public Library 1964], items 106-7, p. 24; John Clare By Himself [1996] 187, 319n; Clare, Letters [1985] 333-4; Michael Rafferty, The Writers of Leicestershire [1984] 10; Goodridge) AA