Author: Bennet, John
Biography:
BENNET, John (1737-1803: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised as John Bennett on 6 Apr. 1737 at Woodstock, Oxford, the eldest surviving child of at least ten children of Sanders Bennett (1706-83), parish clerk, and his wife Mary Baines (1710-70), who had married in 1733. Nothing is known of his education although he seems to have acquired some knowledge of music through “my early acquaintance with the pious strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, under that melodious psalmodist my honoured Father” (Poems, vi). He received some help from Thomas Warton (q.v.), the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and curate of Woodstock, in correcting and improving his verse, and in securing over 500 subscribers for his first volume, Poems on Several Occasions. By a Journeyman Shoemaker (1774). He later published Redemption (1796), a reworking of the themes of Paradise Lost, with slightly fewer but more varied subscribers, and dedicated it to Dr. William Fordyce Mavor (q.v.), who had taken over as curate of Woodstock on the death of Warton in 1790. He married Susannah Marghetts (1739-1825) on 26 Dec. 1760 at Woodstock. They went on to have at least eleven children. On his father’s death in 1783, he became the parish clerk. He was buried (as John Bennett) at Woodstock, 8 August 1803. His wife survived him and died in 1825. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Jan. 2023; Robert Southey, “Introductory Essay” in John Jones, Essays in Verse [1831], 122-24; Winks, 229-30; Baines, 21-22; Goodridge; Bridget Keegan, ed., Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets [2003], 2: 273-96; OJ 17 July and 16 Oct. 1773, 11 June 1825) AA