Author: Coxe, Peter
Biography:
COXE, Peter (1753-1844: ancestry.co.uk)
The ODNB, DNB and Ancestry trees follow the GM obituary virtually verbatim and replicate the errors and omissions. Peter Coxe was born on 13 Oct. 1753 and baptised on 11 Nov. at St. James’s Piccadilly, Westminster, London, the fourth son of William Coxe (1708-60), physician to the household of George II, and his second wife, Mary Martha Lee (1723-86), who had married in 1744. Peter Coxe’s baptism records his mother’s name as Anne--which is either scribal error or mystery. Other siblings are correctly recorded in the same church. He entered Charterhouse School under royal patronage but left at thirteen and later became an auctioneer of paintings and property, trading as the firm of Peter Coxe, Burrell and Foster of 5 Throgmorton Street, City of London. He published the two minor and now forgotten works listed here in 1806-7. The Social Day, A Poem in Four Cantos (1823), a eulogy of country life and sports, was more ambitious, handsomely bound in royal octavo with 32 plates and with over 500 subscribers. Its prospectus had been issued in 1814 and the poem was finished the following year. Production problems with the plates by various artists delayed its appearance. It too is no longer read although its production is still admired and is considered historically important as possibly the first work with steel engraved plates. He never married. The 1841 census recorded him at Wilmot Street, Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, where he died on 22 Jan. 1844, aged 91. He was buried at St. George’s Bloomsbury burial ground on 27 Jan. His elder brothers were William Coxe (1748-1828), archdeacon of Wiltshire and author of Travels in Switzerland(1801), and Edward Coxe (q.v.). (ancestry.co.uk 28 Sept. 2023; ODNB 28 Sept. 2023; DNB; GM Dec. 1844, 652-3 and June 1814, 638, and July 1828, 86-9; Basil Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England [1980]; Oracle and Daily Advertiser, multiple issues 1801-9) AA
Other Names:
- P. Coxe