Author: Gompertz, Isaac
Biography:
GOMPERTZ, Isaac (1774-1856: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in 1774, one of at least fifteen children of Solomon Barent Gompertz, a London diamond merchant, and his second wife Leah Deborah Cohen, who had probably married in 1770. Although no birth record has been traced, land tax records locate the family in the 1770s at Aldgate, City of London, and in 1771 his father thought it helpful to record his son Barent at St. Olave’s Hart Street as a Jew in the local Christian community. He also recorded another son, Benjamin, at St. Mary Axe in 1779. (The family’s local synagogue would have been the largely Sephardic Bevis Marks but as German-Dutch Jews they may have worshipped at the breakaway Hambro, in Magpie Lane, Fenchurch Street.) The claim sometimes made that the family converted is contentious; an accommodation with Christianity is probably more accurate and some of the children did marry out. His father later traded from Finsbury Square and died at his house in Walthamstow in 1808. Isaac may have been apprenticed to a druggist in Savage Gardens, Crutched Friars, City of London, in 1791, but nothing is known about his education. He married Charlotte Florence Wattier, the daughter of a French emigré from Abbeville, on 3 Dec. 1818, at St. Mary’s, Ealing. They had three sons. His first two volumes were admired and somewhat extravagantly compared to Dryden and Pope. His topographical poem, Devon (1825), was written “on a melancholy occasion, in one of the finest counties of England, so calculated to inspire poetical ardour.” W. H. K. Wright in West-Country Poets (1896) and others failed to identify the event but it seems likely that it was the death of Isaac’s brother Barent in Teignmouth on 9 September 1824; Barent left a widow and a large family. Isaac died on 25 Feb. 1856 at 45 Ebury Street, Belgravia, aged 82, and was buried at Brompton Cemetery. His wife and two of his sons survived him. His brother Benjamin was a distinguished mathematician and insurance expert; Ephraim wrote an important work on money; Lewis was an animal rights advocate and inventor. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 17 Apr. 2022; “Gompertz, Benjamin” and “Gompertz, Lewis,” ODNB 17 Apr. 2022; OJ 13 Aug. 1808; Morning Post2 Aug. 1809, 5 Dec. 1818, 29 Feb. 1856; North Devon Journal 17 Sept. 1824; Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History [2011], 352; cemeteryscribes.com, Gompertz family burials; West Country Poets, 210) AA
Other Names:
- J. [Isaac] Gompertz