Author: Frome, Samuel Blake
Biography:
FROME, Samuel Blake (1785-c.1816: ancestry.com)
Frome was a London apprentice with theatrical and literary ambitions. The son of Ann and Carrington Frome, he was baptised on 26 Oct. 1785 at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, and buried there thirty years later on 9 Jan. 1816. (The date of death might have been in Dec. 1815 but early Jan. 1816 is more likely.) In 1800 he was apprenticed to Benjamin Baker of Islington, a map engraver and printer who was appointed engraver to the Ordnance Survey in 1804. He wrote (presumably only the libretto of) an opera entitled "Sketches from Life, or, The Wandering Bard" which was never performed but which led him to test the waters with a selection of Songs, Odes, . . . and Glees from it in 1809. The Critical Review had only this to say about it: "As tastes are various, there may be some persons, whose taste these songs, ballads, &c. may suit better than our own." Undaunted, Frome was thanked for his contributions to Variety by John Glanville (q.v.) in 1811, and in 1813 brought out Poems by subscription, but the reviewers were not much kinder to it. In 1815 he was admitted to the Freedom of the City of London by virtue of "patrimony" through the Ironmongers' Company, of which his father must have been a member. The circumstances of his early death are not known. (ancestry.com 28 Nov. 2021; CR 19 [1810] 443; "Baker, Benjamin," britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG 152848; David Erskine Butler, Biographia Dramatica [1812] 2: 283) HJ