Author: Chapman, Matthew James
Biography:
CHAPMAN, Matthew James (1796-1865: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 6 Oct. 1796 and baptised at St. Michael’s, Barbados, on 23 Feb. 1797, the son of John Chapman, a physician, and his wife Margaret Payne, who had married at St. Peter’s, Barbados, on 2 Jan. 1796. He attended school in Macclesfield, Cheshire, qualified as a physician in Edinburgh (MD 1820), and then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of thirty in 1827 (matric. 1828, BA 1832, MA 1835). He married Mary Anna Reed on 14 Sept. 1837 at Bedford Episcopal Chapel, Exeter. They went on to have at least seven children. He practised for many years as a physician in Liverpool but after his wife’s death at Torquay in Apr. 1848 he moved to London where he is recorded as living at Grosvenor Street, off Hanover Square, Westminster, in the 1851 Census. By 1861 he had moved to 25 Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, and was living with his four unmarried daughters. He died there on 15 November 1865, but was buried at St. Michael and All Angels, East Coker, Somerset, on 20 Nov. 1865. He left an estate of around £4000. Besides the works listed here, his translations of The Greek Pastoral Poets (1836) were widely admired. He also contributed a number of sonnets to Blackwood's Magazine in 1837. In declining health, he prepared a final book of poems, Hebrew Idyls and Dramas (1866), for the press but it appeared posthumously. It reprinted Jeptha’s Daughter (1834) and contained "Ishmael, the Outcast," which was praised by critics although for the most part it adhered to Victorian veneration of biblical female icons: Rebekah, Deborah, Ruth, Susanna, Judith, Esther. (ancestry.co.uk 15 Oct. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 15 Oct. 2021; GM Dec. 1865, 802; Liverpool Mail 29 Apr. 1848; Liverpool Albion 20 Nov. 1865; Cambridge Independent Press 18 Nov. 1865) AA
Other Names:
- M. J. Chapman