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Author: Byerley, J. Scott

Biography:

BYERLEY, John Scott, pseudonym John Scott Ripon (1780-1837: Cartwright)

He was born on 16 Oct. 1780 at Brompton, near Northallerton in Yorkshire; his father was Thomas Byerley (1751-91) but his mother’s name is not known. A brother, Thomas, was born in 1788 and became an editor of various London periodicals. John Scott Byerley was educated at the Royal Free Grammar School in Northallerton before becoming clerk to William Walker, a solicitor. He subsequently moved to a similar position in Stockton-on-Tees where, according to Cartwright, he focused on studying mathematics and was invited to London by William Frend, the social reformer and actuary. He married Esther Loftus in Northallerton on 2 Sept. 1806; they had at least one son and a daughter. In London he got into financial difficulties and was released on 26 June 1807 from the King’s Bench prison where he had been confined for debt. He sought to make a living by translating and writing; he published The Catastrophe…From the French of the Chevalier de St. Aubigné (1803), Buonaparte (1803: a play), Nature, or, A Picture of the Passions (1804), The Conscript, a Serio-Comic Romance (1807), Leopold de Circe, by Madame de Saint Venant (1807), and a translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1810). In 1814 he was in Paris where he was made a knight of the Russian order of St. Vladimir by Emperor Alexander. In 1835 he patented the use of oleagine for the woollen industry. Byerley was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He died at Farm Hill, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 3 Jan. 1837. (ancestry.co.uk 18 Sept. 2023; William Cartwright, Poets of Yorkshire [1845]; Mechanics’ Magazine 23 [1835], 60-61; GM 161 [1837], 331; Richard Vickerman Taylor, Anecdotæ Eborancenses [1883], 74-75)

 

Books written (1):