Author: Gilbert, William
Biography:
GILBERT, William (1763-1824: Cheshire)
William Gilbert was born in Antigua, probably on 1 Oct. 1763, the seventh and youngest child of Nathaniel Gilbert (d 1774) and his wife Elizabeth Lavington (d 1777). Both parents came from established plantation-owning families. Gilbert’s father served for some years as the speaker of the island’s House of Assembly and established the first Methodist Society in the West Indies--remarkable for including both black and white members. William grew up with his parents on their estate in Antigua until he was sent to England for education, about 1770. In Feb. 1779, at the age of 15, he joined the British Navy, seeing action during the revolutionary war against America. In Mar. 1783 he left the Navy and returned to Antigua, where he was admitted to the Bar, was appointed Clerk to the Antigua House of Assembly, and practised as a Counsellor at Law. In 1786 he acted on behalf of a Major Browne in the prosecution of a junior officer by court martial. Browne’s prosecution failed, and Gilbert had to sail to England with Browne for a further trial to support Browne’s claim that the Antigua trial had been flawed. Buoyed by the resulting success, Gilbert decided to remain and work in England, but after an attack of religious mania following an unsuccessful court case, he was placed in an asylum at Hanham, near Bristol, where he remained for about a year. Gilbert then moved to London and set up as an astrologer and maker of magical talismans, writing articles for the Conjuror’s Magazine. The best-known period in Gilbert’s life is between 1795 and 1798 when he lived in Bristol. These are the years in which his writing of The Hurricane (1796) and his association with the first-generation Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey (qq.v.), have given him his small measure of fame. Gilbert suddenly disappeared from Bristol in July 1798. Southey, convinced that Gilbert was intent on working his passage to Africa in a state of mental derangement, wrote a hasty letter to a contact in Liverpool in an attempt to stop him from embarking on an Africa-bound ship. In fact--as the 2018 discovery of Gilbert’s obituary makes clear--he sailed to Charleston SC and then moved on in 1810 to Augusta GA where he died suddenly aged sixty on 30 June 1824. Gilbert never married. (Paul Cheshire, “Biography,” william.gilbert.com 23 Apr. 2024) PC