Author: Ellis, George
Biography:
ELLIS, George (1753-1815: ODNB) pseudonym Sir Gregory Gander
Born on 19 Dec. 1753 in Jamaica, the son of a West Indies plantation owner, George Ellis, who had died three months earlier, and Susanna Charlotte Ellis, a daughter of Samuel Long, a soldier and member of the Jamaica council, he came to England with his mother in 1755. A George Ellis, possibly the subject of this entry, attended Eton College, 1764-70. He accompanied his friend Sir James Harris (Lord Malmesbury) on missions to the Hague (1784), on tours of Germany and Italy (1791), and to Lille (1797). He married Anne, daughter of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Parker on 10 Sep. 1801; they had no children. Briefly MP for Seaford (1796-1802), he did not seek reelection. He contributed to the anti-Pittite Rolliad (1784-85), but, following the Terror, he shifted his support to British war policy. In 1797-98, with William Pitt the younger, George Canning, John Hookham Frere, and William Gifford (qq.v.), he produced the Anti-Jacobin newspaper in support of Pitt’s ministry. Horace Walpole admired his Poetical Tales by Sir Gregory Gander (1778) as “pretty verses.” His Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790; many editions) marked him as a charter member of a medievalist fraternity. In 1801, the bibliophile Richard Heber introduced him to Walter Scott as a fellow medievalist and ballad aficionado. He advised Scott in the publication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802); Scott dedicated Canto 5 of Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808) to him. In 1796, he edited Le Grand's (q.v.) Fabliaux or Tales, Abridged from French. A co-founder and avid supporter of John Murry’s conservative periodical, the QR, he gave sound, friendly advice to Gifford, its editor. Though sympathetic, his seminal articles on Scott and Byron are not uncritical. He died 10 Apr. 1815, in Connaught Place, London. Celebrated by contemporaries as a cultivated and erudite man of letters (he was a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries), as a West Indies planter with possessions in Jamaica, he is in modern eyes compromised by his status as a slave owner. (BL Add. MSS. 28099, 37907; NLS, John Murray Archive; ODNB 3 Mar. 2023; H. Gawthorp, “George Ellis of Ellis Caymanas: A Caribbean Link to Scott and the Bronte Sisters”, Electronic British Library Journal [2005] www. bl.uk/eblj/2005articles/article3.html 3 Mar. 2023; LBS 6 Mar. 2023) JC
Other Names:
- Ellis