Author: HEATH, Noah
Biography:
HEATH, Noah (fl 1780-1829: Wedgwood)
The absence of public records about Heath makes it necessary to fall back on the oral history collected by Henry Carlos Wedgwood and published in 1878 (with woodcut illustrations of the poet’s school and his cottage at Sneyd Green, Staffordshire) which has been the primary source of subsequent histories. He is not to be confused with Noah Heath of Burslem (1768-1846) although they might have been related and had acquaintances in common. Anecdotal history reports that he was born in Sneyd Green, which is now part of Stoke on Trent, about 1780 and attended a daily Free School nearby, but was shaped especially by the Methodist Sunday School that he went to in Burslem. One of his poems, “Lines on the World,” first appeared in 1814 in a Methodist periodical, the New Connection Magazine published at Hanley. He became a potter like his father but as a young man, employed by a wealthy local merchant named Joseph Mayer--who subscribed to Heath’s first collection--he was bitten by a dog and crippled for life: the cauterization of the wound was believed to have caused his paralysis. He was however a convivial character and a popular reciter of his own work. His date of death is not known; he did not publish any more work after 1829. (Henry Carlos Wedgwood, “Noah Heath, and his Poetry,” Romance of Staffordshire [1878] 2: 101-23; ancestry.com 10 Apr. 2022; findmypast.com 10 Apr. 2022; Frederick William Hackwood, “The Poet of the Potteries,” Staffordshire Worthies [1911] 130-5)