Author: Bellamy, Thomas
Biography:
BELLAMY, Thomas (1746-1800: ODNB)
Much of the information in any account of Bellamy is derived from the memoir by Elizabeth Gooch (q.v.) which she appended to his posthumous novel, The Beggar Boy (1801). He was baptised on 22 Nov. 1746 at St. Mary’s, Staines, Middlesex, the son of Thomas Bellamy, a lawyer, and his wife Anne Lomax whose father, Caleb, had been MP for St. Albans. Gooch states that Bellamy received only rudimentary education before his apprenticeship to a hosier in Newgate Street. He opened and successfully operated his own business but, seeking a literary career, he began to work as a clerk in a bookseller’s in Paternoster Row. He contributed to magazines and, in partnership with a Mr. Robarts, in 1787 he began issuing his own periodical, The General Magazine and Impartial Review. Its selling features included ornate engravings and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays; it also included reviews, original prose and verse (much of it by Bellamy), and accounts of the theatres. Bellamy lived in Fleet Street where the periodical was published. His Miscellanies reprint works by him that were originally printed in the magazine. When the partnership between Robarts and Bellamy dissolved in 1793, he began a new but short-lived venture, Bellamy’s Picturesque Magazine, and Literary Museum. Undeterred by its rapid collapse and signs of changing public taste, in 1795 Bellamy began publishing another magazine, The Monthly Mirror, which promised to reflect “Men and Manners with Strictures on their Epitome, The Stage.” Bellamy was a friend of Charles Dibdin (q.v.) and he successively operated two shops in Covent Garden where, among other items, he sold Dibdin’s works; later he also operated a circulating library. On his mother’s death, possibly in Mar. 1795, he inherited a considerable legacy. In Aug. 1800 he suffered an acute but brief illness which ended with his death on 29 Aug. (ODNB 29 May 2023; ancestry.co.uk 29 May 2023; Mrs. Villa-Real Gooch, “Biographical Particulars of Thomas Bellamy,” in Thomas Bellamy, The Beggar Boy [1801]; Northampton Mercury 19 Dec. 1795)