Author: Harvey, J. S.
Biography:
HARVEY, J. S. (fl 1824-40)
He was a dissenter who at least occasionally attended the sermons of Matthew Wilks (1746-1829) at the Tabernacle and Tottenham Court chapels in London; many of his poems are introduced as having been inspired by sermons preached by Wilks and others. Wilks encouraged the publication of his first collection in 1824. The preface of his second collection, Divine Sovereignty and Other Poems (1840), was written by Josiah Redford, minister of the Congregational Church at Stansted Mountfichet, Essex, who had taken over Wilks’s role as sponsor. He describes Harvey a man in a ”humble” way of life who had suffered adversity, and hints at periods of mental illness. The book, published to provide the author with financial support, sold 500 copies in a month and went into a second edition. Nothing more is known with any certainty of Harvey’s early or later life, but he might have been the Jacob Shed Harvey whose baptism as an Independent was registered by his parents Elizabeth and Richard Harvey at Maldon, Essex, on 22 Sept. 1786—who might have been the Jacob Harvey buried at Maldon in 1847. (findmypast.com 16 Feb. 2022; Josiah Redford, preface to J. S. Harvey, Divine Sovereignty [1840])