Author: Button, John V.
Biography:
BUTTON, John V. (1786-1872: ancestry.co.uk)
John Viney Button was born in Southwark, now South London, and was probably baptised on 19 Feb. 1786 at Darenth, Kent, the eldest surviving son and one of at least seven children of John Button (1761-1825), Baptist minister and later master of a school at Lewes, East Sussex, and his wife Sarah (Sally) Meane, who had married at St. Leonard’s, Bromley, Kent, in 1784. From 1791 Sally Button registered births at Dr. Williams’s. His father was a philosophical radical and was allegedly in William Pitt’s Black Book listed as a “dangerous demagogue.” He announced the opening of a school on 11 July 1791, in a four-page printed prospectus: An English Grammar School . . . at Lewes. John Viney Button attended this school and produced the two student poems listed here in 1804-5, besides a Brighton and Lewes Guide (1805). At some stage, he or the family conformed and he proceeded to Queens’ College Cambridge (matric. 1806, BA 1810, MA 1813, Fellow 1811) on a Steere Charity Exhibition and entered the Established Church. He was ordained deacon (1813) and priest (1815). He was successively Curate of Mersham, Kent, from 1815, Wantage, Berks. (1841-8), Stone, Staffs. (1849-52) and Blofield, Norfolk (1853-72). He married a widow, Sarah Freeman (1770-1825) on 17 Dec. 1814 at St. Mary, Smeeth, Kent. It is unclear if there was issue. He then married Harriet Susannah Slaughter (1800-27) on 9 Aug. 1826 at Mersham, Kent. She died after “a lingering illness” on 16 Aug. 1827. There does not seem to have been any issue. He married Ann Harman (1777-1843) on 23 Feb. 1831, at Hurst, Berkshire. She died at Wantage in 1843, again without issue. He died on 24 Mar. 1872 at the home of his brother William in Upper Holloway, North London, leaving an estate of under £4000. (ancestry.co.uk 13 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 13 Aug. 2022; CCEd 13 Aug. 2022; Kentish Weekly Post 27 and 30 Dec. 1814, 11 Aug. 1826, 28 Aug. 1827; Reading Mercury 28 Feb. 1831, 25 Nov. 1843; John Caffyn, Sussex Schools in the 18th Century [1998], 175-8, 287, 372; Surrey Gazette 30 Mar. 1872) AA
Other Names:
- John Button, Jr.
- J. V. Button