Author: Hastings, Thomas
Biography:
HASTINGS, Thomas (1741-1801: ODNB)
The primary source of colourful details about Hastings is Nichols’s Anecdotes, which is backed up by at least a birth record. The son of Eleanor and William Hastings, he was baptised on 24 May 1741 in Sunderland, Durham. He was apprenticed to his uncle, a builder who had worked on Lord Lyttelton’s mansion at Hagley, Worcestershire. Once out of his indentures, he worked in different parts of the country as a carpenter, arriving eventually in London. His first known publication, Britannia’s Tears (1778), is a serious, competent elegy on the death of William Pitt the Elder (1708-78), with Hastings’s name on the title-page, but he later turned to prose satire under outlandish pseudonyms with The Book of the Wars of Westminster (1784) and The Royal Rambler (1793). According to Nichols, he then stopped working at his trade and became “an itinerant bookseller and pamphleteer.” A birthday ode produced regularly for the Prince of Wales brought in a small gift of cash for a time but was discontinued “by order.” He is said to have dressed like a clergyman (there is no suggestion of impersonation) and to have been known as “Dr. Green.” He does not appear to have married. He died in lodgings at New Court, Moor Lane, Cripplegate, London, on 12 Aug. 1801. (ODNB 1 Mar. 2022; John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century [1812] 3: 726; findmypast.com 1 Mar. 2022)