Author: Cornish, Thomas Harttree
Biography:
CORNISH, Thomas Harttree (1797-1844: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the second son of Thomas Cornish and his wife Elizabeth Hartree who had married in Barnstaple, Devon, on 4 Nov. 1787. He was baptised in Barnstaple on 30 Dec. 1797. In the early 1830s he was working as a printer and publisher in Barnstaple and he edited the North Devon Advertiser. He matriculated at New Hall, Oxford, on 4 Dec. 1834. In 1838 he was admitted to Gray’s Inn and called to the Bar in 1841. He struggled financially and on 12 June 1838 Edward Lytton Bulwer (q.v.) wrote to the RLF recommending him for assistance; he was awarded £20. In 1839 he was awarded a further £10. However, when he was reminded that the RLF required written acknowledgement of any assistance, Cornish wrote an abusive letter to Octavian Blewitt, secretary of the fund. Cornish’s file also contains a memorandum by Blewitt documenting a statement by Thomas Miller (q.v.) that, following poor sales of Cornish’s Songs of the Loire, he had been employed to rewrite the 2nd edition in return for “a sovereign and three breakfasts.” Cornish also published Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Principal Towns of the North of Devon (1826), The Volume of Affections (1836; republished in 1838 as The Historical Picture of Woman), The Thames: A descriptive poem (1842), and The Juryman’s Legal Handbook (1843). He died at Gravesend on 10 Sept. 1844. His will leaves copyright in his works to Eliza Jane Cornish; she may have been his wife or, more likely, a niece, the daughter of his brother Charles. (WorldCat; ancestry.co.uk 5 Jun 2018, 12 Nov. 2022; Alumni Oxonienses; RLF file 928)
Other Names:
- T. H. Cornish