Author: Barnard, Robert
Biography:
BARNARD, Robert (1762-1830: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 7 Apr. 1762, at Upperthorpe, near Sheffield, Yorkshire, one of the fifteen children of the Quakers John Barnard (1723-89) and his wife Hannah Wilson (1730-93), who had married on 5 May 1751 at Kendal in Westmorland (now Cumbria). It is not known where he was educated but his younger brothers attended Ackworth School after it had opened in 1779. In A Wreath (1817), there is a long poem, “Ackworth School” (1-18). His father later moved to Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, where he died in 1789. Robert appears to have stayed in Sheffield and then Manchester before also moving to Coalbrookdale. In Sheffield he styled himself the “poet-laureate” but his verse was generally regarded as undistinguished. He married Hannah Gayland (1758-1825) on 21 July 1796 at Liverpool, with his occupation given as merchant from Manchester (Holland called him “a dealer in staple wares”). She died on 5 August 1825 at Coalbrookdale. There does not appear to have been any issue. He died on 21 Mar. 1830 at Coalbrookdale. His eldest sister, Mary Barnard (later Dickinson) (1752-1822), also wrote verse. A copy of her one-page double-column poem, To the Memory of the late Saml. Fothergill, Willm. Hunt, & John Woolman, Eminent Ministers Among The People Called Quakers (London: Darton 1772) is at the Library of the Society of Friends, London. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Jul. 2022; Newsam, 110-11; Sheffield Independent 13 Aug. 1825, 10 Apr. 1830; Friends’ Books 1:192-3; John Holland and James Everett, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery [1854-6], 1: 136-7; J. W. King, James Montgomery: A Memoir, Political and Poetical [1858], 35; [Sheffield Poetry], Cambridge Quarterly Review, 2.i. [Sept. 1824], 78-108) AA