Author: FURNESS, Richard
Biography:
FURNESS, Richard (1791-1857: ODNB)
He was born on 2 Aug. 1791, one of the nine children of Samuel Furness, the owner of a small farm at Eyam, Derbyshire, and his wife Margaret Bradshaw. At the local school he was found to be precocious, but he left to be apprenticed to a currier when he was 14. He continued his quest for miscellaneous learning, however, and began writing verses. He joined the Methodists at 17 and preached locally for a few years. Once out of his indentures, he walked to London and enlisted in the army for a year; broke with the Methodists; and returned to Eyam to practice his trade. On 29 Dec. 1816 he married a Roman Catholic, Frances Ibbotson (1792-1844) of Hathersage, after an elopement; they had seven or eight children, one of whom died in childhood. They settled finally in Dore, where he became the village schoolmaster, parish clerk, and occasional physician. (Dore was a part of Derbyshire until 1934 but is now considered a suburb of Sheffield, South Yorkshire.) After the death of his first wife he married a widow, Mary (Swift) Lunn, at her parish of Staveley on 17 Oct. 1850. He retired as schoolmaster with a small pension, supplemented by his role as registrar of births and deaths. Furness died at Dore on 13 Dec. 1857 and was buried at Eyam on 16 Dec. Besides the satirical poem included in this bibliography, he published Medicus-Magus . . . in Three Cantos (1836) and contributed poems to the Sheffield Iris, developing a local reputation which was significantly extended by a posthumous subscription edition of his Poetical Works, edited with a biographical preface by G. Calvert Holland, MD, in 1858. (ODNB 14 Aug. 2023; ancestry.com 14 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 14 Aug. 2023; G. Calvert Holland, ed., Richard Furness, Poetical Works . . . with a Sketch of his Life [1858]) HJ