Author: Eagles, John
Biography:
EAGLES, John (1783-1855: ODNB)
Born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, on 8 Oct. 1783, he was the only son of Thomas Eagles (1746-1812), a merchant and classical scholar, and his wife Charlotte Maria Tyndale (1759-1814). He was baptised in St. Nicholas, Bristol, on 8 Nov. He was educated at the Rev. Samuel Seyer’s Royal Fort school in Bristol (Seyer is mentioned unflatteringly in Felix Farley) and at Winchester (1797-1802). Determined to become a landscape painter, Eagles travelled to Italy and must also have gone to Ireland where he married Harriet King in St. Thomas’s, Dublin, on 2 Jan. 1806. They had five children but in Sept. 1819 Harriet died in childbirth with a daughter who died soon after her mother. Perhaps it was marriage that made Eagles set aside the uncertain life of an artist; intent on becoming a clergyman, he matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, on 26 May 1808 (BA 1812, MA 1818). He was ordained deacon in May 1818 and priest in Dec. 1818. He was a curate at St. Nicholas in Bristol before moving to Halberton, Devon, in 1822. There he married Elizabeth Manley on 6 May 1822; they had four children. They moved in 1834 to Winford, near Bristol, and then to Kinnersley, Herefordshire, where Eagles held his final curacy before retiring to Bristol in 1841. Eagles contributed prolifically to Blackwood’s Magazine from 1831 until his death. His series “The Sketcher” includes both prose and verse and was issued in book form in 1856; his Essays Contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine appeared in 1857. The “Felix Farley” poem, included in this bibliography, was originally published in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, edited by his friend John Mathew Gutch. Eagles published The Bristol Riots: Their Causes, Progress, and Consequences as “By a Citizen” in 1832. He was instrumental in arranging for the publication of William Williams’s semi-autobiographical Journal of Llewellin Penrose by John Murray in 1815. He died at home, 11 King’s Parade, Clifton, on 8 Nov. 1855 and was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist, Clifton; there is a memorial to him in Bristol Cathedral. (ODNB 28 May 2024; ancestry.co.uk 28 May 2024; EN2; E. Walford, Hardwicke’s Annual Biography [1856]) SR