Author: Broughton, Brian
Biography:
BROUGHTON, Brian (1766-1838: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised as Bryan on 29 June 1766 at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith, London, the son of Charles Broughton (1735-1820), a surgeon, and his wife Elizabeth Young, who had married in Shoreditch in 1758. He was educated at Winchester (where he won the best English Essay prize for 1784) and New College, Oxford (Scholar 1785, Fellow 1787, BA 1789, MA 1792). He was a Senior Proctor 1803-4. He was ordained deacon (1789) and priest (1790). New College presented him with the living of St. Mary’s, Long Ditton, Surrey, in 1811 and he remained there until his death. He married Frances Fagg on 12 July 1824 in his church. They had a daughter, Frances, in 1831. He died on 8 Jan. 1838 and was buried at Long Ditton. The GM obituary described him as “a person of elegant taste, and himself no mean artist.” An early work, A Poem on a Voyage of Discovery, undertaken by a Brother of the Author's, with Sonnets (1792) may now be attributed to him on the basis of a voyage his brother, Lieutenant William Robert Broughton (1762-1821), commander of HMS Chatham, undertook in Nov. 1791 when, returning from Captain George Vancouver’s expedition, he sighted The Snares and Chatham Islands. His later voyages are better known, were seen through the press by Brian Broughton, and were published as A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean [1795-98] (London 1804). The library at the University of British Columbia holds a copy of the 1792 poem but its provenance is not known. There is additional internal evidence that Brian Broughton is the author. The work contains two sonnets, “Oxford ! with joy I leave thy Gothic tow’rs,” and “On Catharine Hill, near Winchester,” both places where he was educated. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 4 Nov. 2022; CCEd 4 Nov. 2022; ODNB [brother] 4 Nov. 2022; OUCH 29 June 1811; Hampshire Chronicle 15 Jan. 1838; GM Feb. 1838, 216; Andrew David, ed., William Robert Broughton’s Voyages of Discovery to the North Pacific 1795-1798 [2010], lxiii-iv) AA