Author: Bryant, John Frederick
Biography:
BRYANT, John Frederick (1753-1791: “Account”)
He was born in Market Street, St. James, Westminster, London, on 22 Nov. 1753, the eldest child of John Frederick Bryant, a tobacco-pipe maker and sometime journeyman house painter, and his wife Mary Smith, who had married “clandestinely” (irregularly) at St. George’s Chapel, Mayfair, in 1752. He spent much of his childhood in Sunbury on Thames, Surrey, with his mother’s parents as his father struggled to find work in London. His father moved to Bristol in 1760 to resume his trade of tobacco-pipe maker and employed his son as a packer. The boy began reading the Bible and story books and followed the familiar path of being enchanted by tales “of giants, fairies, magicians, and heroes performing impossibilities” which was probably further intensified by his shyness and partial deafness. As his father’s finances declined, he was forced to work more and was eventually prohibited from reading except on Sundays. After the death of his mother he became estranged from his father and ran away to London where he worked for a pipe-maker at Woolwich. He served briefly as a privateer but was discharged due to poor eyesight. After a brush with a press-gang he returned to Bristol, where he set up as an itinerant pipe-maker and continued to write mostly satirical verse. He married Ann Welsh on 23 Nov. 1783 at St. James’s, Bristol. A son, John Frederick, was born the following year but died in London in August 1790. (An earlier marriage to a Mary Milsom in 1779 cannot be ruled out but the 1783 marriage documents do not give his status as bachelor or widower; it is also possible that the 1779 record was a remarriage by his father.) A chance encounter in Cardiff with a customer (Sir Archibald Macdonald, the Solicitor General) who admired his songs and verses led to patronage and an offer to go to London, where he set up in business as a stationer, printer, and printseller and published Verses (1787), which included an account of his life. He died of consumption in his apartments at Harvey’s Buildings, Strand, aged 37, and was buried on 20 Mar. 1791 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster. (“An Account of My Life,” Verses [1787], i-xxxiii; ancestry.co.uk 5 Dec. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 5 Dec. 2022; Bath Chronicle 31 Mar. 1791; GM Mar. 1791, 282; Goodridge) AA