Author: Headley, Henry
Biography:
HEADLEY, Henry (1765-88: ODNB)
A scholar and poet who died young, Headley owes his reputation chiefly to his friend Henry Kett (q.v.), who published a new edition of Headley’s work on Old English verse, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, along with a selection of his poems, a detailed memoir, and elegies by himself (Kett) and William Lisle Bowles (q.v.) in 1810. Later biographies echo Kett’s memoir. Headley was the only son of the Rev. Henry Headley, rector at the time of Irstead, Norfolk, and later vicar of North Walsham, and his wife Mary Anne Barchard. He was baptised on 27 Apr. 1765. Headley was fortunate in his schoolmaster, the Rev. Samuel Parr (1747-1825), to whom he dedicated his Poems in 1786 when the collection appeared for the first time with his name on the title-page. At Trinity College, Oxford (matric 1782, BA 1786), he was strongly influenced by the poet and literary historian Thomas Warton (q.v.), who was a Fellow, and formed lasting friendships with certain classmates, including Bowles. As an undergraduate he contributed poems to GM which he assembled with other work in Fugitive Pieces, which he published anonymously but revised for Poems (1786). After the death of his father in 1785, he secretly married Elizabeth Carmody (1762-90) at St. Marylebone, London. The couple settled in Norwich where Headley wrote the Select Beauties with critical remarks, the first of a projected three volumes of literary scholarship. It was published by subscription with a substantial list of subscribers and was for the most part respectfully reviewed. But Headley was dying of consumption. A journey to Portugal in May 1788 failed to cure him; he returned to Norwich in Aug. 1788 and died on 15 Nov. He was buried at North Walsham on 20 Nov. close to his father; his widow arranged a memorial inscription by another of his Trinity friends, the classicist William Benwell (q.v.). She was married at Norwich for a second time on 24 Dec. 1789, to Francis Colombine, but she died after “a long illness” and was buried on 25 Oct. 1790 at North Walsham. (ODNB 3 Apr. 2022; Alumni Oxonienses; findmypast.com 3 Apr. 2022; Henry Kett, “Memoir” in Henry Headley, ed., Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry [1810] 1: iii-xix; Bury and Norwich Post 27 Oct. 1790) HJ