Author: Hawkins, Joseph
Biography:
HAWKINS, Joseph (fl 1820)
Although there is significant internal evidence about the author in Poetical Hours, no convincing matches have been found for his name in the public record. The book has his name on the title-page and is dedicated from the town of Sherborne in Dorset to the Rev. Thomas Maurice of the British Museum (1754-1824) as “Author of Indian Antiquities, &c.” The list of subscribers consists mainly of local addresses in Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall, including two MPs and Admiral Digby, whose family were major landowners in the county. The contents suggest a classically educated gentleman (poems include one written at the Colosseum in Rome and another in the catacombs of Paris, various lyrics about ladies, and an elegy for Princess Charlotte) but his name does not appear among the alumni of Oxford or Cambridge. The Bodley copy contains the armorial bookplate of the army surgeon B. Lawrence Hawkins (1830-87) but there is no clear proof of a family link. Sherborne is the closest post town to Over Compton where Joseph Hawkins (1744-1816) was married and buried, and where he and his wife Elizabeth Vincent, who married in 1769, had six children baptised between 1773 and 1781—but none of them was named Joseph, and at the time of his death the father was only a parish clerk. (findmypast.com 14 Mar. 2022; ancestry.com 14 Mar. 2022)