Author: Cole, William
Biography:
COLE, William (1768-1833: ancestry.com)
Early sources give his birthdate as 26 Sept. 1769. He was however baptised on 3 Aug 1768 at Hempnall, Norfolk, one of the ten or more children of John Cole and his wife Mary Richardson. His parents were flourishing tenant farmers at Boyland Hall, Morningthorpe. On 26 Sept. 1793 at Carleton Rode, he married Catherine Browne (d 1821). Of their five children, Catherine (1794-1840) remained unmarried; Meadows John (1802-1851) served in the army in the West Indies; James, Meadows’s twin, died in infancy (1802-1803); and George (1807-1886) was a surgeon at Ely, Cambridge. Early in his adulthood Cole was a respected and well-connected gentleman farmer. In his poem Rural Months (1824), however, he describes himself as the “luckless child of wayward Fortune’s sport, / Shipwrecked.” He had initially succeeded as a tenant farmer at Ubbeston Hall, Suffolk, later at Earsham, Norfolk, and lastly at Starston, Norfolk. Then, in 1821, his fortunes collapsed; he was briefly imprisoned in Norwich Castle for debt; and in 1823 creditors seized his entire estate. Through relatives, the Matchetts, whose firm printed his poetry, he gained employment as clerk of works for the Norwich and Lowestoft canal. The canal is the subject of his celebratory 1833 poem, Poetical Sketch. He died on 23 Feb. 1833 at Lakenham, close to Norwich, and was buried at St John de Sepulcher. His neglected poem Rural Months is technically skillful, intelligent, and readable. The countryside he portrays in it is beautiful and terrible, predictable and fickle, literary and realistic. Of the poem’s 527 mostly middle-class subscribers, several are eye catching: the Rev. Edward Valpy (ODNB), brother of Richard Valpy (q.v.); lawyer and antiquary Thomas Amyot (ODNB); John Jacob Whittington, whose family patronized the novelist George Gissing; Mrs. Pinckney of Peterborough, a relative of South Carolinian revolutionaries; and Oliver Goldsmith’s printer, James Scatchard of Ave Maria Lane. Some of the subscribers are well-known evangelicals: a brother of Elizabeth Fry, John Jospeh Gurney (ODNB); the pious London printer Luke Hansard (ODNB); Maria Downes Newton, widow of Thomas Newton of Clapham Common; and, also of Clapham, MP Charles Barclay. (ancestry.com 25 July 2023; Norfolk Chronicle, 18 Dec. 1779, 16 Oct. 1841, 10 Apr. 1858; Monthly Magazine, 19:1 [1805], 413; London Gazette, 22 Mar. 1823, 471; E. Walford, County Families [1860], 561) JC