Author: Croker, John Wilson
Biography:
CROKER, John Wilson (1780-1857: ODNB)
The son of John Croker and his second wife Hester Rathbone, he was born on 20 Dec. 1780 in Galway, distinguished himself as a schoolboy in Portarlington, and received his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1800. At Trinity he was a prominent member of the College Historical Society. He also served in the college yeomanry troops during the 1798 rebellion. He entered Lincoln's Inn on 3 Feb. 1800 and began publishing verse. He was called to the bar in Ireland in 1802 and practised law in Dublin. In 1806, he married Rosamund Carrington Pennell of Waterford; after the deaths of their two children, they adopted her youngest sister. He became an MP in 1807 and proved so able as a deputy for Wellesley (later Wellington) that he was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty in 1809--a position he held until 1830. From 1811 to 1854, he was a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review. Croker was a founding member of the Athenaeum Club in London. He wrote authoritatively about the French Revolution, was a diligent editor (notably but controversially, of Boswell's Life of Johnson), but will probably be remembered primarily, in literary circles, as the anonymous author of a damning review of Keats's Endymion. He died on 10 Aug. 1857 at Hampton, Middlesex. (ODNB 29 May 2018; DIB 25 July 2025) SR
Other Names:
- J. W. Croker
- John W. Croker
- T. C. D.