Author: Gibbons, Thomas
Biography:
GIBBONS, Thomas (1720-85: ODNB)
The son of an independent minister, the Rev. Thomas Gibbons (d 1757), and his wife Grace, he was born at Reach, Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire, on 31 May 1720. He was educated at a grammar school and at dissenting academies in Deptford and Moorfields in London. Isaac Watts (q.v.) was among those who examined him for the ministry. Gibbons was ordained on 27 Oct. 1743 and appointed minister at the Independent church at Haberdashers’ Hall and, in 1754, tutor in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric at Mile End dissenting academy (later Homerton). He held both of these posts until the end of his life and also held various lectureships including at the meeting house in Monkwell street (1759-81). New Jersey college (later Princeton University) made him MA in 1760 after he raised funds for the college and Aberdeen University conferred a DD on him in 1764. Gibbons married Hannah Shuttlewood at St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in London on 3 July 1744. She came from a well-known non-conformist family. They had four sons of whom two, Thomas and Samuel, were alive when their parents died. Gibbons was a prolific and wide-ranging writer. His first published work was probably An Impartial Review of Mr. Melvil’s Last Piece Against Mr. Nichols (1739), an intervention in a published attack on nonconformists which involved him in a brief controversy; it was followed by a collection of verse, Poems on Several Occasions (1743). A longer book of poems, Juvenilia: Poems on Several Subjects (1750), reprinted some poems from the earlier book and attracted an impressive list of subscribers. Gibbons also published hymns, sermons, a book on rhetoric, Female Worthies, or the Lives and Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women (1777), and Memoirs of the Rev. Isaac Watts (1780). Gibbons kept a diary from 1749 to 1785 and parts of have since been edited and published. He was living at Hoxton Square in London when he suffered a stroke and died a few days later on 22 Feb. 1785. He was buried in the cemetery at Bunhill Fields on 3 Mar. His will, proved on 26 Feb. 1785, left his books and papers to his son Thomas and his manuscripts to Hannah. She died in 1786. (ODNB 30 Sept. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 30 Sept. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 30 Sept. 2024) SR