Author: Courtier, Peter Lionel
Biography:
COURTIER, Peter Lionel (1776-1847: ODNB)
Born in London on 29 Feb. 1776 the son of merchant Jean Louis Le Couteur (1739-1803) and his wife, Sarah Dutton (b 1746), his early education was under a Baptist minister, Morgan Jones of Hammersmith. He wished to enter the ministry, but instead in 1792 was reluctantly apprenticed to Bedwell Law, a wholesale bookseller in Ave Maria Lane. While at Law’s, he co-established a debating society in Cheapside, the “School of Eloquence.” Law’s son published Courtier’s first two books, Poems (1796) and Revolutions (1798). Their positive reception encouraged him “to enlist … under the banner of literature.” During the next five years, he authored “anonymous compositions in criticism, politics, and biography” for several journals, including the Pocket Magazine and the Lady’s Pocket Magazine. In May 1800, he published Pleasures of Solitude. He had gained the Earl of Buchan’s patronage, so many of his subscribers were Scots, including well-known names, James Grahame, John Leyden, and Walter Scott (qq.v). The book’s engravings are from designs by a member of the School of Eloquence, Robert Ker Porter. On 14 July 1800, at Old Church, St Pancras, he married Sarah Rhodes (1775- 1853). They had three children: Lionel, Charles, and Sidney. In Mar. 1802, he was complaining of financial calamities connected with his family. Two years later, the RLF granted him £10 while he was in custody “in a Sponging house” in Blackfriars Road, and, in the following year, £20 when he was imprisoned in Fleet Street Prison for debt. He then abandoned his family “to contend with difficulties & want.” In 1809, he was a journalist protégé of Eugenius Roche of The Day. His employment now became desultory and sporadic: editor of Universal Magazine; assistant at Rivington’s bookshop; the Monthly Visitor’s office manager, where he worked with Thomas Harral (q.v.). He superintended Brown’s Self-interpreting Bible and wrote essays for the National Register, republished in The Pulpit (1809, 1812, 1816). Claiming unconvincingly that “marriage has been the source of all my calamities,” year after year he appealed to the RLF for relief. In 1841 his reliance on the Fund came to an end, his “authorship not appearing to justify further assistance.” When he died, 8 May 1847, he was resident at 39 Great Saffron Hill, Holborn. (ODNB 24 May 2023; RLF; Scots Magazine [Mar. 1802], 228; [P. L. Courtier, ed.], The Lyre of Love [1806], 149-50) JC
Other Names:
- P. Courtier
- P. L. Courtier
- Peter L. Courier