Author: Gardner, Richard
Biography:
GARDNER, Richard (fl 1824-57)
A quite prolific author, he was originally from the Teme valley in Worcestershire and worked as a cloth cap maker in Birmingham, Warwickshire. Although his books give some personal information, attempts to trace him through public records have failed. The first poem in his Poems gives his father’s name as Richard and states that he was of noble descent. Gardner also claims a connection to the Kyrewood estate at Tenbury Wells on the banks of the Teme river. He identifies himself as “The Poet of the Teme” on the title page. The family must have fallen on hard times: he also states that he had no more than three weeks of schooling and his first book—although not later ones—stresses his lack of education and semi-literacy. He lived at Clifton upon Teme before moving to Birmingham in about 1825 where directories from the 1850s list him as a cloth cap maker with premises at 5 Lease Lane and 197 Market Hall. He applied to the RLF on 9 Feb. 1846 but was rejected on the grounds that his letter requests a loan rather than a grant. Included in the RLF file is a harshly satirical review of Poems from the Worcestershire Miscellany. A similarly harsh review of his Dudley Castle, An Historical Tragedy, In Five Acts (not traced) was published in the Birmingham Journal in 1856. Undeterred, Gardner published a number of other works: William the Conqueror, a Tragedy (1825), Poems on Great Witley (1841?), The Right Way of the World (1841?), and A New System of Astronomy (1852). (ancestry.co.uk 6 Sept. 2024; RLF file 1134; Birmingham Journal 6 Sept. 1856) SR