Author: Brown, James
Biography:
BROWN, James (c. 1731-1823: Hone)
By all accounts James Brown, “the Durham Poet” or “Baron Brown,” was a wildly eccentric individual who held not only that he was a supremely gifted poet but that he was immortal. While it has proven frustratingly difficult to locate public records for him, anecdotes do survive and William Hone (q.v.) supplies a memoir in his 1827 Every-Day Book. He claimed to have been born in Berwick-on-Tweed but he moved to Newcastle where he worked as a tailor—or, possibly, the owner of a rag shop—and began writing verse. He was a Buchanite or follower of Elizabeth Buchan of Glasgow who convinced her small band of followers that they would ascend to heaven without first dying. Buchan’s sect collapsed after her death in the 1790s and Brown later became a follower of Joanna Southcott (q.v.); Hone records that he “believed in every mad fanatic who broached opinions contrary to reason and sense.” His first wife (name and the date of the marriage are not known) died in Newcastle. His second marriage was to Sarah Richardson whose property in Durham may have included the theatre in Sadler Street where they lived. Brown called himself the poet laureate of Durham and, after receiving a package of apparently official material naming him as a baron, he took on the title of “Baron Brown.” His vanity made him an easy target for pranksters who sent him letters and poems purporting to be from famous people; one of these, reproduced in Brown’s Poems and identifying Brown as “the greatest poet,” is by “S. T. Poleridge, Author of the Ancient Mariner, &c.” He and Sarah fell on hard times late in life and, after a brief stay in the workhouse, he died at the age of 92 in lodgings in Durham on 11 July 1823. Sarah died on 3 July 1824. In advance of the general election in 1820 Brown was sent copies of A Sublime Epistle, Poetic and Politic, by James Brown that he was requested to distribute. He did so—pocketing the proceeds—but not before he had printed an address to readers disclaiming the authorship. Hone states that the real author was a journalist but gives no further information. BL attributes the work to Brown; this database lists it as anonymous. (William Hone, The Every-Day Book, or Everlasting Calendar [1827]; John Sykes, Local Records [1833]) SR