Author: Hawkins, William
Biography:
HAWKINS, William (b 1751: ancestry.com)
In 1775, “William Hawkins, Gent.” published in London, by subscription, a sizable volume of Miscellanies in prose and verse, the “first efforts of a youthful mind,” which he dedicated to “a certain young lady” in possession of his heart. By his own admission, many of the pieces had appeared before in the periodical press. Some were recycled from his pamphlet about London actors, Candid and Impartial Observations (1774), also published by subscription and with a similar list of subscribers’ names—many of them Misses—without place-names or addresses. Most of the poems that were not about the stage and performers were pastorals about shepherds and shepherdesses, as in his later verse collections. The stagestruck youth was the son of the Rev. William Hawkins (q.v.) and his wife Blanch Griffiths, and had been baptised at Alvecot, Bampton, Oxfordshire, where his father was the curate, on 22 Nov. 1751. Like his father he graduated from Pembroke College Oxford (matric 1768, BA 1772, MA 1775). But after graduation he went to London, where he met Fennetta Hunt of Westminster; they were married at Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 25 Feb. 1773. Thereafter the trail goes cold, although since his books refer to his experience as an amateur actor in “a private assembly,” it is possible that he was the “Mr. Hawkins” who appeared in minor roles in the London and provincial theatres between 1793 and 1810. (ancestry.com 19 Mar. 2022; findmypast.com 19 Mar. 2022; Highfill 7:194) HJ