Author: Herring, Thomas Sawyer
Biography:
HERRING, Thomas Sawyer (1781-1848: RLF)
The most informative record of Herring’s career is an RLF file containing three applications for relief, 1839-48. The public record provides some support. He may be the Thomas Herring, son of Thomas and Nancy Herring, whose baptism was registered in Westminster on 30 Dec. 1781. He was certainly buried at St. Martin in the Fields, London, on 1 Jun. 1848 after a long illness. His widow Ann, born on 22 Sept. 1783, may have been Ann Bissett, who married a Thomas Herring at St. Botolphe, Aldgate, London, on 7 Jan. 1810. His letters refer to their “large family”; by the time of his death there remained four daughters, three of them married but unable to provide financial support, and the fourth a governess without a situation. The RLF granted ten pounds in 1839 and 1848 but rejected an application in 1840 on the grounds of insufficient authorship. Herring had spent much of his adult life in Portsmouth, where all of his known volumes of verse up to 1838 were published. He began as a “mercantile agent” (the journey to Haiti in 1807-9 was part of that job), then served as clerk to an EIC agent in Portsmouth. Thereafter he earned his living primarily as a teacher and headmaster. He was master of an academy at Portsmouth for twenty years; when the school failed he turned to private tutoring. It was probably in 1838 that he returned to London, where he complained that teaching was a “precarious” occupation, “and poetry even more so.” He published a collection of Poems in Portsmouth in 1838, with a second in London (1839), also Dover (1841). He claimed to have published in addition a poem on Catholic Emancipation, a poem on the Battle of Navarino, a verse history of England, an English grammar in verse, and a “dramatic interlude” entitled The Fairy and the Fisherman (1830), but WorldCat has no record of extant copies. (RLF #949; findmypast.com 28 Feb. 2022; WorldCat; contributions by AA) HJ
Other Names:
- T. S. Herring