Author: Brownell, William
Biography:
BROWNELL, William (fl 1815)
He was an acquaintance of Ebenezer Rhodes (q.v.) and lived in Sheffield, Yorkshire, although one poem in his collection establishes that he was originally from somewhere else. One of his poems is about Repton Academy in Derbyshire and another is about a daughter, Mary Ann. Holland states in his memoir of Rhodes that Brownell had been on the stage and Guest confirms this, saying that he performed in The Stranger (a translation from Kotzebue) in Rotherham. Possibly he was the William Brownell who is identified in the 1841 Census as a cutler (like Rhodes). If so, he was about 60 in 1841 and he had married his wife, Mary Baker, on 12 May 1799 at the Cathedral of St. Peter in Sheffield. No other information has been located. (ancestry.co.uk 6 Sept. 2023; John Holland, “Memoir of Ebenezer Rhodes,” The Reliquary, Jan. 1863, 123; John Guest, Rotherham Writers in Verse [1874]) SR