Author: Cawthorn, James
Biography:
CAWTHORN, James (1719-71: ODNB)
He was born on 4 Nov. 1719 to Thomas Cawthorn, an upholsterer in Sheffield, and his wife Mary Laughton. He was baptised on 2 Dec. at Saint Peter’s, Sheffield. Educated first at Sheffield Grammar School and then for a year at Kirkby Lonsdale, he became an assistant teacher or usher at Rotherham School in 1736. His first publication was a poem, “Meditation on the Power of God,” in the GM in Sept. 1735. He was admitted as a sizar at Clare College, Cambridge on 11 Mar. 1737/8 but went to London where he assisted William Clare in his Soho Academy. On 14 Nov. 1742 he married Mary Clare, William’s daughter. He was ordained as a deacon in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in Sept. 1743 and as a priest in Mar. 1748. Despite his youth, in 1743 he was appointed headmaster of Tonbridge Grammar School in Kent; while there he had a reputation for strict discipline but he also enlarged and improved the school and founded an impressive library. (Tonbridge is sometimes spelled Tunbridge, including in Cawthorn’s Poems; it is, however, distinct from Tunbridge Wells, also in Kent.) Some of Cawthorn’s poems were written for pupils to recite for the annual visits by the Company of Skinners, patrons of the school. In 1746 Mary gave birth to twin daughters who lived just a few days; Cawthorn’s most personal poem, “A Father’s Extempore Consolation on the Death of Two Daughters,” is about this event. Tragedy struck again when another daughter was born the following year; this time both Mary and the infant died. In 1747 Cawthorn’s best-known work, “Abelard to Eloisa,” was published anonymously in GM. He was granted a Lambeth MA degree (that is, one conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury) on 6 Mar. 1748; his sermon, preached at the school in June 1748 before officers from the Company of Skinners, was published as Benevolence, the Source and Ornament of Civil Distinctions. On 15 Apr. 1761 he died following a fall from his horse. He was buried in St. Peter and St. Paul Church in Tonbridge where his sister Elizabeth—among his siblings, the principal legatee in his will—had a monument erected to his memory. Elizabeth inherited his manuscripts and her husband, the Rev. Edward Goodwin, wrote a brief memoir of Cawthorn and may have edited Poems. The book includes some previously unpublished juvenilia and other poems published in Cawthorn’s lifetime. (ODNB 27 Feb. 2022; ACAD 27 Feb. 2022; CCEd 27 Feb 2022; ancestry.co.uk 27 Feb 2022; W. C. Newsam & J. Holland, The Poets of Yorkshire [1845]; M. J. Cawthorn, James Cawthorn, George Austen, and the Curious Case of the Schoolboy Who was Killed [2017]) SR
Other Names:
- Rev. Mr. Cawthorn