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Author: Brandreth, Henry

Biography:

BRANDRETH, Henry (1797-1840: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 17 May 1797 at Houghton House, Houghton Regis, near Dunstable, Bedfordshire, the only child of Henry Brandreth and his wife, Dionysia Turner, who had married at St. Mary’s, Lambeth, London, in 1793. He was educated at St. John’s, Oxford (matric. 1815, BA 1819, MA 1823) where he was admired for the elegance of his Latin compositions. He entered the Middle Temple in 1822 but being of independent means, he abandoned law and “addicted himself to the cultivation of poetry” (GM). He became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Medico-Botanical Society, and a subscriber to the Royal Humane Society and the Literary Fund Society. The GM obituary assigns Odes and Other Poems, to him. This probably refers to Odes, Original and Translated. With other Poems (London 1824): the obituary closes with lines from Thomas Dermody (q.v.) which Brandreth himself quoted in that work (p. 119). The title of Odes and Other Poems (Newcastle 1823) is a more exact fit but the connection to Newcastle has yet to be established and the attribution may be an error. A further work, Minstrel Melodies (1839) may have been published earlier but no copy has been located. His Songs of Switzerland (1833) was written after a walking tour the previous year. He also wrote extensively for magazines and annuals. Following his mother’s death in Feb. 1836 at the Brandreths’ London townhouse, 102 Jermyn Street, St. James, he appears to have suffered from delusions and depression. He had visions of his dead mother at Houghton House and suffered from “painful feelings, which for some time past weighed on our friend’s mind . . . . His sorrows were many.” (GM, 213). In the April before his death, he placed an advert in the London press asking “Mary,” the housemaid in Jermyn Street in 1834-5 (who possibly tended to his mother), to come forward to hear news to her advantage. He committed suicide by cutting his throat “in a temporary fit of insanity” on 17 Dec. 1840 at his house, 14 Norfolk Street, Strand, London, aged 43. He was buried on 28 Dec. at All Saints, Houghton Regis. He never married. (ancestry.co.uk 21 May 2022; GM Feb. 1841, 212-4; Boyle 38-9; MH 22 Apr. 1840, 1 June 1840, 24 Dec. 1840, 29 July 1846; LES 9 Feb. 1836) AA

 

Books written (5):

Newcastle upon Tyne: printed by John Marshall, 1823
London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1824
London: R. Willoughby, 1833