Author: Brown, Robert
Biography:
BROWN, Robert (1792-1846: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Douglas, Isle of Man, on 10 Feb. 1792 to Captain Robert Brown and his wife Jane Drumgold. His father died at sea in 1800 and he was raised by his mother. He never attended university but was educated at Castletown in the Isle of Man. He was ordained and appointed to the church of St. Matthew in Douglas. On 21 Apr. 1819 he married Dorothy Thomson; they had nine children, including Thomas Edward Brown (1830-97) who became a poet. In 1832 he became vicar of Braddan, Isle of Man. In a memoir of his father, T. E. Brown records that his imperfect eyesight led him to memorise his sermons and that some of them were in Manx. Of the verses in Poems (1826) T. E. Brown says they were composed when his father was about 34 and, with the exception of “Verses to my Native Land,” they are disappointing: “the dead level of Evangelical mediocrity prevails from cover to cover.” Brown’s satires were published in the Manx Liberal but not included in the book, presumably because they were not religious poems. Poems is dedicated to the Rev. Hugh Stowell, a cousin and the rector of Ballaugh, Isle of Man. Brown died on 3 Dec. 1846 and was buried in St. Brendan Old Churchyard, Douglas, on 5 Dec. 1846. His wife, Dorothy Brown, died on 7 Mar. 1875. (ancestry.co.uk 8 Sept. 2023; T. E. Brown, “Manxiana,” Ramsay Church Magazine [1898]; ODNB [for T. E. Brown] 8 Sept. 2023) SR