Author: Booker, Luke
Biography:
BOOKER, Luke (1762-1835: ODNB)
Born in Nottingham on 20 Oct. 1762, he was a son of Matthew Booker (1714-1784) of Barker Gate, and his wife, Elizabeth. He was a brother of twins, Mark (b 1760) and Elizabeth (1760-1763). His father, a schoolmaster at Nottingham and assistant to the parish of St. Mary, educated him at home. Ordained deacon in 1785 and priest in 1789, in 1794 he was elected master of the Free Grammar School at Dudley; he was instituted rector of Tedstone Dellamere (1805-12) and vicar of St Edmund’s Dudley (1812-35); and, from 1815, he was chaplain in ordinary to the Prince of Wales. Some of Booker’s poetry anticipates Wordsworth: nature reflected in tranquility inspires the imagination. For his poem Highlander, in 1791 King’s College, Aberdeen, awarded him the LL.D. There is no recorded copy of his Juvenile Poems, advertised by Rivington in 1790. He published his final imaginative work, The Mitre Oak: a Descriptive Poem, in 1835. An indefatigable sermonizer, he delivered more than 170 charity sermons in which he advocated for Sunday Schools, for inoculation against cow pox, and for the humane treatment of animals. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature from 1823, and he supported the RLF applications of poets Robert Milhouse, James Baker, and Thomas Jones (qq.v). His now most respected work is Description and Historical Account of Dudley Castle (1825). He married five times, in 1795 to Elizabeth Child; in 1796 to Anne Blakemore, the mother of his daughter Harriet Esther and his son Thomas William (MP for Hereford); in 1811 to Phillis Ann Moxam, the mother of his daughter Phillis Ann and his son Edward Luke; in 1818 to Elizabeth Grant, the mother of his children Philips Grant, John Richard, Elizabeth Catherine, Mary Philippa Artimisia, and Eliza Jane; and, lastly, in 1829, to a woman 42 years younger than himself, Elizabeth Barclay, the mother of his son John Key. He died at Bower Ashton, near Bristol, on 1 Oct. 1835. (ODNB 26 May 2023; CCEd 26 May 2023; ancestry.com 26 May 2023; PROB 11/1854; Northampton Mercury, 35 Oct. 1784; Derby Mercury, 24 Apr. 1794; GM [1823], 72; Annual Register [1835], 237; GM [1836], 93-4; “Booker v. Allen,” Reports of Cases Decided in the High Court of Chancery [1854], 2:269-99; N&Q [1861], 431; G. R. Dyer, “Murder of Mary Ashford,” Criticism [1997], 383-408) JC
Other Names:
- L. Booker