Author: Cowdell, Thomas Daniel
Biography:
COWDELL, Thomas Daniel (1769-1833: DCB)
His father, Samuel Cowdell, was a soldier; his mother, whose name is not known, was Irish. He was born in London, where he became a convert to Methodism in 1784. In 1789 he emigrated to Nova Scotia, ran a small shop in Halifax, and married a Scottish woman, Margaret, with whom he had eight children. When an uncle died in Ireland, Cowdell returned to Britain hoping for an inheritance, apparently without success. His Poetical Journal and the later spinoff The Nova Scotia Minstrel were published to raise money on this venture. On his return to Halifax in 1811 he started a music school as a supplement to shopkeeping, but in 1815 he gave up and went back to Dublin for nine years, leaving his children behind. In 1824 he returned to Nova Scotia, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His final publication, advertised in Halifax in 1826 but with no recorded copies extant, was a prose account of a husband's being visited by a vision of his dead wife. (DCB 14 May 2018) HJ
Other Names:
- Thomas Cowdell
- Thomas D. Cowdell
- Thomas D. Cowdel