Author: Billinghurst, J.
Biography:
BILLINGSHURST, John (1801-60: ancestry.co.uk)
Without examination of the one known surviving copy of the Poetical Chronology (1830), Billinghurst’s role in writing it cannot be gauged: the book may be a new composition or Billinghurst may have corrected and added new information to an existing text, possibly the one by Dominique de Saint Quentin which was published in 1792. Even Billinghurst’s identity is not entirely certain but likely he was the son of James Billinghurst and his wife Sarah Chapman, born at Leatherhead, Surrey, on 13 July 1801 and baptised in the Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas on 9 Aug. 1801. His parents had married in St. James, Piccadilly, on 6 Oct. 1800. He married Sarah Ann Feldwick (d 1856) on 18 Aug. 1828 in Tonbridge, Kent; they had two sons, John William and Henry Farncombe. Billinghurst was active as a bookseller in Brixton in the 1830s, publishing such works as A Manual of the French Verbs (1836), and his name appears in subscription lists to various works of history. Census records show that the family lived in Brixton Place. In 1848 he served on a jury for the investigation into the Lambeth cholera outbreak of that year. The 1851 Census gives his occupation as “retired bookseller.” At the time of his death on 28 Mar. 1860 he was a widower living with his elder son at 30 Brudenell Place, New North Road, Middlesex. He left an estate of under £200. (ancestry.co.uk 4 June 2023; Amanda J. Thomas, The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak [2010]; E. W. Brayley, A Topographical History of Surrey [1841]; The Bookseller 26 Apr. [1860])