Author: Browne, Richard Lewis
Biography:
BROWNE, Richard Lewis (1811-70: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 14 Aug. 1811 and baptised at St. Marylebone, Westminster, on 15 June 1813, probably the eldest of three sons of Richard Brown and his wife Mary (maiden name unknown). (He seems to have used the name Browne from about 1850 but it is not known why.) He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge (matric. 1830, BA 1834, MA 1837, Fellow 1832-5), and then entered the church. At Cambridge he entered The Taking of Jerusalem in the First Crusade (1832) for the Seatonian prize but did not win it. (William Chapman Kinglake of Trinity , q.v., instead won it for a second time.) The attribution is based on the BL’s presentation copy from his father to his future daughter-in-law. Browne married Mary Christian Blagdon, the daughter of a Bow Street printer, on 9 Apr. 1835 at South Bersted, Sussex, where he later became curate 1836-42. They had two sons and a daughter and remained in the south-east where he held various curacies until 1862 when they seem to have moved to Old Windsor before finally settling in St. Helier, Isle of Jersey, where he died on 3 Oct. 1870 and was buried at St. Saviour’s. He left a small estate of under £600. His wife survived him and died in 1875. His other publications are all but forgotten: The Eton Question (1834), John of Hapsburg. A Tragedy (1843), an expurgated edition of Juvenal for schools (1847), and Sussex Sermons (1854). (ancestry.co.uk 6 Sept. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 6 Sept. 2021; Morning Post 11 Apr. 1835; Jersey Independent 16 Oct. 1875) AA