Author: GUY, Joseph
Biography:
GUY, Joseph (1783-1867: findmypast.com)
Surprisingly few public records have been found for Guy, but he was probably the son of Joseph Guy of Woodham, Surrey, who was baptised on 2 Feb. 1783. The name of his mother is not known. He became a schoolmaster and ultimately the professor of geography at the Royal Military College at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire (later Sandhurst). On 24 Dec. 1795 he married Sarah Poole at St. Mary’s, Lambeth, Surrey; they had at least two sons. He was the author—with the London firm of Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy—of a long series of best-selling school textbooks. The best known of them was his geography textbook “on a new and easy plan” (1810) but there were also a Latin primer, a “cyclopaedia,” and books on spelling, grammar, arithmetic, ancient history, and astronomy. His poem about Birmingham is an anomaly among his publications. (He cannot have been the J. Guy, q.v., who published bawdy songs in London in 1797.) His younger son Joseph Junior is noticed among the translators of Ovid, q.v.: he assisted his father on some of the textbooks and became his successor in the series. Guy died at Eden Place, Kentish Town, London, on 16 Jan. 1867, aged 83. (findmypast.com 5 Aug. 2025; ancestry.com 5 Aug. 2025; Durham County Advertiser 22 July 1836; The Bookseller [London] 31 Jan. 1867) HJ