Author: Edwards, John
Biography:
EDWARDS, John (1772-1845: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Fulneck, near Leeds, on 5 Dec. 1772 and baptised the following day, the son of Richard Edwards and his wife Sarah (possibly Lister), who were both part of the Moravian community but may have married in the established church at Calverley in 1771. If that if correct, his father was a cordwainer (shoemaker). Their son John moved to Derby around 1790 and remained there in business until his death. Wordsworth quoted him in the Essay on Epitaphs (1810), calling him “the ingenuous poet,” and later received an enthusiastic response to The Excursion (1815). According to Spencer T. Hall (1812-85: ODNB), also the son of a Quaker shoemaker, who had last seen him in 1842 in a counting-house, he had been a liquor-merchant: “Could the lonely hills, rocks, and rivers of Derbyshire speak in language we could translate, they might doubtless give a far more interesting history of his heart and its loves--the true life within him--than could ever be gather amid the crowd: for his true life was not there--in as much as it was his misfortune to be a liquor merchant . . . ” (Newsam). He was probably the John Edwards who married Sarah or Sally Smith in All Saints, Derby, on 24 Sept. 1797. They had at least six children, whose baptisms and burials at Ockbrook record the father's occupation as wine-merchant. The youngest (and only surviving) daughter, Fanny Eliza, died aged 15 in 1834; the eldest daughter, Sarah, died aged 24 in 1831. He died on 15 May 1845 and was buried at Ockbrook Moravian Churchyard on 21 May. Edwards was planning an edition of his poems before his death but it did not appear. (ancestry.co.uk 1 Jan. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 1 Jan. 2022; Derbyshire Family History Society (Moravian Burial Records); Newsam 137-8; Derby Mercury 29 Jun. 1831, 23 Jul. 1834; 21 May 1845, 28 Aug. 1850; Robert Woof, William Wordsworth, The Critical Heritage 1793-1820 [2001], item 174) AA