Author: Derenzy, Samuel Sparrow
Biography:
DERENZY, Samuel Sparrow (d 1838: ancestry.co.uk)
His surname is also given as De Renzy and in the record of his death appears as Renzé. Reviewers of his The Faithful Irishwoman (1813) assumed that he was Irish, and he may have been part of the Irish Protestant De Renzy family but no birth or baptismal record has been located. He died at Southampton in Mar. 1838 and was buried on 1 Apr.; the record gives his age as 74 so he was likely born in about 1764. He published two novels in addition to The Faithful Irishwoman: Marian de Britoon (1822) and Life, Love, and Politics (1825). Derenzy served in the army and was a captain in the Royal South Gloucester regiment before becoming Adjutant in the Duke of York’s New Forest Rangers on 10 May 1805. He may have been the father of Samuel Derenzy, baptised at Fawley, Hampshire, on 6 Aug. 1808; if so, his wife was Mary Pittman but no marriage record has been found. The preface to the work listed in this bibliography, William Tell, a Dramatic Sketch, states that the author at first resisted the temptation of reading Schiller’s version “in the fear of insensible plagiarism.” He read Schiller only when he arrived at the boat scene and, with his mind filled with “the fulness, variety, and energy of Schiller’s powerful conceptions,” he then drew his own work to a hasty conclusion. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Jan. 2025; EN2; The Hampshire Antiquary 2 [1892], 35) SR