Author: Gent, Thomas
Biography:
GENT, Thomas (1780-1832: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 13 Jan. 1780 and baptised on 17 Apr. at St. Sepulchre, City of London, the son of Thomas and Elizabeth Gent (whose maiden name may have been Billingham). Nothing is known about his education but he worked in the office of the Victualling Department of the Navy at Yarmouth from about 1803. He printed various works, listed here, at Yarmouth (1805-18) but by the end of the war or shortly thereafter had moved back to London. He married Martha Norfor (1789-1827) on 12 Apr. 1808 at St. Nicholas, Yarmouth. She was the daughter of a Yarmouth ropemaker and acquired some fame in her own right, delivering lectures on “the Physiology of the External Senses” in Nov. 1826. (They were never printed but the syllabus prospectus survives in a unique copy at Pennsylvania State University Library.) She died on 15 Aug. and was buried at St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, London. He then married Sarah Sophia Daniell on 9 Oct. 1831 at St. Mary’s, Hanwell, Ealing. She was the eldest daughter of the landscape painter William Daniell and was herself a painter. She exhibited a watercolour portrait of William Godwin (q.v.) at the Royal Academy in 1832. Charles MacFarlane thought highly of both wives but less so of him, “a bloated buffoon--a coarse, drunken Mephistopheles” (Reminiscences, 124). There does not appear to have been issue from either marriage. He died on 6 Nov. 1832, aged 52, at St. Martin’s Lane, Westminster, and was buried at St. Martin’s in the Fields burial ground. Sophia, his widow, applied to the RLF for assistance and was awarded £30. His most ambitious poem, “Prometheus,” first appeared in the New Monthly Magazine (Mar. 1816, 159-60); other poems to the memory of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charlotte Smith, Henry Kirke White, and Princess Charlotte belong to a well-worn genre. Topographical poems on Hornsey Wood, the Chain Pier at Brighton, and “On the Rupture of the Thames Tunnel” are of some historical interest. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Apr. 2023; Watkins, 126; Literary Gazette 18 Aug. 1827; LES 10 Nov. 1832; GM Nov. 1827, 474; RLF, 1/741; Charles MacFarlane, “Tom Gent,” Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1855), ed. John F. Tattersall [1917], 117-25; The Exhibition of the Royal Academy [1832], item 520; “Mrs Gent,” edpopehistory.co.uk) AA