Author: Bridges, Thomas
Biography:
BRIDGES, Thomas, (b c. 1810: ODNB)
pseudonyms Caustic Barebones; Cotton, Junior
There is very little reliable biographical information. He was the son of Thomas Bridges and his wife (her name is not known) and was born at Hull, Yorkshire. Likely he was the Thomas Bridges who was baptised at Holy Trinity church on 4 Dec. 1710. His younger brother, Daniel Bridges, was baptised at Holy Trinity on 2 Apr. 1713 and died in 1792; he was an apothecary who was later admitted to the College of Physicians, and a successful inventor. Their father was buried at Holy Trinity on 4 Jan. 1747. Although the groom’s age is given as 29 not 33, Bridges was likely the man of that name who married Isabella Pearson in Hull on 11 Aug. 1743. He was in partnership with Joseph Sill and Roger Blunt in Hull as wine-merchants, dealers, chapmen, and bankers. They went bankrupt in 1759 and it was probably then that Bridges moved to London where he sought to establish himself as a writer. His Homer Travestie, a burlesque translation of Book One of the Iliad, was published in 1762 as by “Caustic Barebones, a broken Apothecary.” It was reviewed in MR but no copy of the book has been located. Later in 1762, using the same title and the pseudonym “Cotton, Junior” (an allusion to Charles Cotton’s Scarronnides, or Virgil Travestie of 1664), he issued an expanded edition including Books 1-4 of the Iliad. There were further expanded editions in 1764 and 1767 but these, like the ones listed in this bibliography under the title A Burlesque Translation of Homer, were issued anonymously and without a pseudonym. He also published Battle of the Genii, a burlesque of Paradise Lost (1765); Battle of the Bonnets: A Political Poem from the Erse (1766?); and a novel, Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770). He wrote two dramatic works which were produced at the Haymarket theatre: a comic opera, Dido, in 1771, and a musical entertainment, The Dutch-Man (1775). For both of these James Hook wrote the music. No record of his death has been located but it seems unlikely that he was alive in 1797 when the fourth edition of his Homer was issued. (ODNB 28 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 28 June 2023; MR 26 (1762), 454-58; ESTC; Newsam; William Munk, Royal College of Physicians of London, 1701-1800 [1861], 232)