Author: Dalby, John Watson
Biography:
DALBY, John Watson (1799-1885: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Gray’s Inn Gardens, Holborn, London, on 11 Nov. 1799, the son of James Dalby, publican, and his wife Elizabeth Pickering. At thirteen he went to work for a bookseller. At eighteen he contributed poems to the radical newspaper The Black Dwarf. Dalby’s admiration of contemporary poets is expressed in two of his contributions to The Troubadour, “Lines” on viewing a bust of Keats and “Stanzas” on the death of Shelley. From 1826-28 he edited the Literary Chronicle and, with his friend George James De Wilde (1804-71), the Ladies’ Penny Gazette (1832-34). He was a long-term friend and correspondent of Leigh Hunt (q.v.) to whose memory he dedicated Tales, Songs and Sonnets (1866), which contains memorial poems of historical interest on Maria Jane Jewsbury, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, and John Clare (qq.v.). He formally married Anne Loathis (1805-95) on 8 Dec. 1869 at the Registry Office, St. Pancras, but may have married her elsewhere or irregularly much earlier. At some point, probably in the 1830s, he joined the Excise Office or Inland Revenue and moved to Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where a daughter, Gertrude Mary, was born in 1840. A son, James Watson Dalby, had been born in 1835 but died at six weeks. By 1851, Dalby had been posted to Wootton, Northamptonshire, where he renewed his friendship with De Wilde, to whose Northampton Mercury he sometimes contributed. In 1857 he moved to Thornbury, Gloucester, and in 1861 was recorded there as retired with his wife and daughter running a school. By 1871, he had moved to 8 Crown Terrace, Richmond, Surrey, where he died on 4 June 1885, aged 85, leaving an estate of under £300. Both he and his wife are buried at St. Mary Magdalene, Richmond. Keats House, Hampstead, holds eight volumes of his notebooks which contain many sonnets and memorial poems on Shelley (K/MS/01/089-96). (ancestry.co.uk 11 Aug. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 11 Aug. 2023; Northampton Mercury 26 Apr. 1879, 20 June 1885; Richmond and Twickenham Times 6 June 1885; Bristol Mercury 13 June 1885; The Biograph and Review Apr. 1879, 1: 213-218; Willis W. Pratt, “Mr. Dalby and the Romantics,” [Texas] Studies in English 26 [1947], 90-107; Edmund Blunden, “A Lover of Books, J. W. Dalby [1799-1880],” Etudes Anglaises 5 [1952], 193-201) AA
Other Names:
- J. W. Dalby