Author: Giles, Joseph
Biography:
GILES, Joseph (d 1781?: findmypast.co.uk)
The title page of Miscellaneous Poems on Various Subjects includes the name not of the author, Joseph Giles, but of “the late William Shenstone” (1714-63), poet and landscape gardener, who had “revised and corrected” the verse. The Advertisement states that Shenstone’s “handwriting appears in most of the manuscript copies.” Those copies do not survive and the extent of Shenstone’s involvement cannot now be gauged; at least one reviewer suggested that he must have had little or nothing to do with the book given the poor quality of the verse. However, it was through Shenstone that three of Giles’s poems were included in Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems (1748-58). The Advertisement proposes that Miscellaneous Poems could serve as a supplement to Collection and, to that end, it was printed in the same format. In fact, the three poems in Collection are also printed in Miscellaneous Poems. Giles was an engraver who in the 1770s was recorded in the Birmingham directories as occupying premises in Snow Hill, Birmingham. He may be the Joseph Giles who was apprenticed in 1726 to a locksmith in Birmingham by Elizabeth, his mother. An auction of his collection of books, paintings, and other objects was advertised in Birmingham on 23 May 1763. Likely he was the Joseph Giles whose burial took place at St. Martin’s, Birmingham, on 24 Oct. 1781. His poems indicate that he was married and had at least one child. (ancestry.co.uk 11 Sept. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 11 Sept. 2024; ODNB [Shenstone] 11 Sept. 2024; Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette 23 May 1763; MR 44 [1771], 343)