Author: Dovaston, John Freeman Milward
Biography:
DOVASTON, John Freeman Milward (1782-1854: ODNB)
Born 30 Dec 1782 at his family’s estate, “The Nursery,” at Twyford, near West Felton, Shropshire, he was the son of John Dovaston (1740-1808), an attorney’s apprentice turned farmer, and his wife, Ann (Price) Dovaston. The elder John Dovaston was a Unitarian well versed in Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin; in 1798, he founded the Breidden Society that for several decades met annually to enact pseudo-Druidic rituals. Initially educated at Oswestry grammar school, Dovaston migrated to Shrewsbury School, then under the mastership of Dr Samuel Butler (q.v.). He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1800 (BA 1804, MA 1807). Having passed the Bar in 1807 at Inner Temple (GM, erroneously, “Middle Temple”), he practiced briefly on the Welsh circuit. A commissioner of bankrupts and a liberal Whig, he took an active role in local politics. At Shrewsbury, one of his instructors had been George Reynolds, the father of John Hamilton Reynolds (q.v), his friend and correspondent, who dedicated to him his 1814 poem, The Eden of Imagination. Dovaston was the friend of other accomplished men: Octavius Gilchrist (q.v.), John Britton, Charles Reece Pemberton, Ralph Rylance, and his inseparable companion, a banker-naturalist, John Eddowes Bowman. In Apr. 1810, he established a club that met annually to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday. Among its members were Andrew Cherry, Henry Llewellin, and John Hughes (qq.v.). The first published poems known to be his appeared under the pseudonym “Musiphilus” in 1803 and 1806 in Lady’s Monthly Museum and La Belle Assemblée, respectively. In MR (May 1813, 99), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (q.v.) harshly reviewed his poem Fitz-Gwarine. She doubted that “his compositions would rise above mediocrity.” A friend of John Claudius Loudon, and the biographer and friend of Thomas Bewick, Dovaston made a substantial contribution to the science of ornithology. At “The Nursery”, he employed as his gardener and servant his brother Edward (1785-1853) and Edward’s wife, Sarah (1782-1860). He died, unmarried, at his home on 8 Aug. 1854 and is buried at West Felton. (ancestery.com 31 Mar. 2023; ODNB 31 Mar. 2023; Alumni Oxonienses; Staffordshire Advertiser 27 June 1808; Monthly Magazine 33:4 [1812], 1; GM 42 [1854], 395-96; Cambrian News 26 Dec. 1879; Bye-Gones [Dec. 1879], 347; Shropshire Archaeological Society Transactions [1904], 325-26; Bewick to Dovaston: Letters 1824-1828, ed. G. Williams [1978]; J. Richardson ed., Letters from Lambeth [1981]) JC
Other Names:
- John F. M. Dovaston