Author: Dyke, T. Webb
Biography:
DYKE, Thomas Webb (1773-post 1838: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised 5 April 1773, at Chiseldon, Wiltshire, the son of William Dyke (1746-1831) and his first wife Elizabeth Dyke (1741-1775), who was possibly a cousin. They had married in 1769. He was apprenticed to an attorney in Nov. 1788. He then went to St. John’s College, Oxford (matric. 1802) but did not take a degree. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1807 and was listed as an equity draughtsman in 1811. He married Harriet Hayter on 30 Nov. 1816 at St. Marylebone, London, with her mother’s consent as she was not of full age. They had a son in 1817 and a daughter who was still-born in 1823. He was living at Upper George Street, Portman Square, a fashionable area, but seems to have spent time in the King’s Bench prison in 1812. He may have ceased practising by the time of A Poetical Satire Addressed to British Radicals (1831) which he signed from Lambeth. Although he supported reform, he was highly critical of the “pseudo Saints” pursuing it and was perhaps already showing signs of mental illness in his frequent outbursts of indignation. By 1837-38, he was wandering around Lambeth and the Strand, drinking and eating in taverns without paying. He was arrested by police half a dozen times, sometimes only partially clothed; on one occasion a magistrate gave him money to buy a new coat. As James Dyke (sic) he was arrested in Jan. 1838 for dining without paying at the Hercules Tavern, Westminster Road, Lambeth. Thereafter there is no further trace of him. He may have died a pauper’s death under another name and with an incorrect age or any number of variants thereof. There is no recorded death for Thomas Webb Dyke in London in the official GRO registers after 1837. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Jan. 2023; Morning Post 3 Dec. 1816, 29 Aug. 1837; New Monthly Magazine Jan. 1817, 546; London Courier 8 Jan. 1838; London and County Directory 1811; J. J. Howard, Miscellanea, Genealogica et Heraldica [1890], 3: 395) AA
Other Names:
- T. W. Dyke