Author: Fernyhough, William
Biography:
FERNYHOUGH, William (1753-1814: findmypast.co.uk)
He was baptised on 15 Apr. 1753 at Timsbury, Somserset, the son of the Rev. William Fernyhough and Dorothy Hadderton, who had married in the same parish (where his father was Rector) in 1749. He was educated at Balliol, Oxford (BA 1774) and then entered the Established Church, becoming Curate at Wolstanton (1775) and Stoke upon Trent (1777). In 1793 he was appointed Vicar of Aspatria, Cumberland, a living he held until his death, although he seems to have remained in Staffordshire. His first volume Poems (1786) consists largely of eulogies of Josiah Wedgwood and the society of Etruria. Trentham Park (1789) is a lively tour through an important Staffordshire estate. A three-page poem separately published on the occasion of an assassination attempt against the King, Lines on the Providential Escape (1800), is excluded from this bibliography. Poems on Various Occasions (1814), collected in the last year of his life, consists of patriotic verses, epistles, and occasional verses, often on aspects of his daily life such "On the Beautiful Village of Tettenhall" and "A Day at Buxton." His patriotic poem "To the Right. Hon. Edmund Burke" (1791), composed after reading Burke’s Reflections, is a good snapshot of conservative responses to the French Revolution. He died “in a fit, and no help at hand" while walking from Penkhull to his house in Hart’s Hill, Cot, Newcastle under Lyme. He never married and left his estate of under £200 to his servant Elizabeth Hinckley, with a further stipulation that she was to receive all the profits from his Poems. (findmypast.co.uk 12 Jul. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 12 Jul. 2021; CCEd 12 Jul. 2021; London Chronicle 19 Feb. 1791; Oxford University and City Herald 12 Nov. 1814; GM Nov. 1814, 506; Staffordshire Poets 104-8; Simms 167) AA
Other Names:
- W. Fernyhough