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Author: Clarkson, Edward

Biography:

CLARKSON, Edward (1787-1871: ancestry.co.uk)

The author of Heroic Epistle to William Cobbett—a harsh satire on Cobbett (q.v.)—was undoubtedly the Edward Clarkson who was born in Brighton, Sussex, on 7 Sept. 1787 and baptised at St. George’s, Hanover Square, London, on 6 Nov. His parents are named in the baptismal record as Benjamin and Elizabeth Clarkson. Benjamin Clarkson married Alathea Vale at St. George’s on 2 May 1773 but no record has been located either for her death or for his marriage to Elizabeth. Nothing is known about Edward Clarkson’s education but he developed an abiding interest in ancient Egypt; he both lectured and published articles in periodicals on the subject. On 24 May 1812 he married Jessy Webb (b 1790) of Harrow, Middlesex, at St. Mary’s in Harrow. The marriage record identifies him as of St. George’s parish in London but they later moved to the Manor House, Kentish Town. They had three daughters and two sons; a daughter, Jane Clarkson, exhibited at the Royal Academy, and a son, Douglas Aurelian Clarkson, became an architect. In 1836 another daughter, Antoinette, married Robert W. Billings whose book, Architectural Illustrations and Account of the Temple Church, London (1838) includes Clarkson’s “Essay on the Symbolic Evidence of the Temple Church.” Jessy Clarkson predeceased her husband sometime before the 1871 Census when he is recorded as living in Queen’s Road, Dalston, London, with a son-in-law, Frederick Henderson (by then a widower himself), and his family. Clarkson died at Dalston on 4 May 1871; a death notice in the Morning Advertiser describes him as “for many years actively connected with the Liberal Press.” Clarkson’s other publications include Robert Montgomery and his Reviewers, With Some Remarks on the Present State of English Poetry (2 edns, 1830), The Reviewers Reviewed (1830?), and The Suez Navigable Canal (1843). The title page to his book on Montgomery (q.v.) also claims a novel, Herwald de Wake (1823), which EN2 attributes to Hewson Clarke, a Cambridge-educated historian who was active at about the same time. Given Clarkson’s title page and Clarke’s move to Canada in the mid 1820s, it is likely that Clarkson was the author of Herwald and of a later novel, Felician Alphery (1828). (ancestry.co.uk 29 Dec. 2023; Morning Advertiser 8 May 1871; ODNB [for Hewson Clarke] 29 Dec. 2023; ACAD [for Hewson Clarke]; EN2)

 

Other Names:

  • E. Clarkson
 

Books written (1):

London: printed by Thomas Wood, 1817