Author: Carrington, Nicholas Toms
Biography:
CARRINGTON, Nicholas Toms (1777-1830: ODNB)
He was born on 19 July 1777 in Plymouth, Devon, to Henry Carrington and his wife Rosamund Verant; they had married in Stoke Damerel, Devon, on 14 May 1775. He was baptised in the Batter Street Presbyterian chapel in Plymouth on 11 Aug. 1777. The family moved to Plymouth Dock (called Devonport from 1824) where his father worked in the dockyard and was a grocer. Carrington was apprenticed to a measurer in the docks but he found both the work and his fellow apprentices uncongenial—in an autobiographical fragment he complained of “ruffianism” and cautioned parents against such an apprenticeship for their sons. After about three years he ran away and joined a ship of war, seeing action at the defeat of the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent in 1797—an event that he commemorated in his earliest attempt at verse. On his return to England he worked as a teacher and moved to Maidstone, Kent, where in about 1804 he married Ann Mason (no record has been located). Henry Edmund, the first of their seven children, was born in Maidstone in 1806 before the family returned to Plymouth Dock where Carrington established a school in 1809. Under what he described as “temporary embarrassment” he first applied to the RLF in Dec. 1823; by then he and Ann had nine children. The RLF awarded him a total of £75; in addition, a fund was established in Apr. 1828 by his friends which raised about £150 for his relief. In 1827 he first showed signs of the tuberculosis that eventually killed him but he continued working until Mar. 1830. His My Native Village and Other Poems was completed when he was severely weakened by illness; it was first published in about June 1830 and Carrington died on 2 Sept. 1830 at Henry’s house in St. James’s Street, Bath. He was buried in Combe Hay churchyard in Somerset. His will, administered on 6 Oct. 1830, left everything including an insurance payment to Henry “in trust and for the benefit of his Mother brothers and sisters.” Henry and a brother, Frederick, were newspaper editors. (ODNB 2 Jan. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 2 Jan. 2024; H. E. Carrington, “Biographical Preface,” in The Collected Poems of the Late N. T. Carrington [1834]; Cheltenham Chronicle 24 June 1830; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 9 Apr. 1831; RLF file 500 [as Nathaniel Carrington]; Boase) SR
Other Names:
- N. T. Carrington