Author: Hewitt, Richard Porter
Biography:
HEWITT, Richard Porter (1795-1847: ancestry.co.uk)
Although no baptism record has been traced, on the balance of probabilities he was probably born in 1795, possibly the son of Richard Hewitt and Lucy Porter who had married at Holy Trinity, Chester, on 8 Nov. 1791. The fullest account of his life, by Richard Wright Proctor, gives his birth as Chester and his age at death as 57. Although he knew him personally, Proctor probably got those details from two newspaper reports in the Chester Chronicle and Manchester Times but his asylum entry, burial record, death certificate, and the local newspaper report in the Kendal Mercury give his age at death as 52 which is more consonant with the marriage of Richard Hewitt and Lucy Porter. He was admired in Manchester circles (though not beyond) for his two volumes of verse produced while he laboured as a cabinet maker. His Odes, Reflective and Historical (1831), listed here, despite being heavily indebted to Collins, was noted for its obscurity and sublimity and “Midnight Hour” was singled out for praise and subsequently anthologised. Under the pseudonym of Caius Marcus, he also published Satires, Rhapsodical, on Aristocracy (1842) which still remains unattributed to him in library catalogues. He was disappointed by the reception of both volumes and beset by “isolation and disappointment,“ his “reason wandered” and he was placed in the County Asylum on 7 June 1845. Proctor compared his fate to that of John Clare and noted he “sought refuge with the fairy queen from the aching void which embittered his existence . . . . He simply formed an inner world, when the outer world failed” (Proctor, 248, 250). He died on 1 Sept. 1847 at the Lancaster Lunatic Asylum and was buried on 4 Sept. at St. Mary’s, with his age given as 52. There is no record for a marriage of a Richard Porter Hewitt in Chester or Manchester but since his admission to the asylum in 1845 and his death certificate of 1847 record him as Richard Hewitt, a marriage under that name (for which there are several candidates) cannot be entirely discounted. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 4 Apr. 2022; Kendal Mercury 11 Sept. 1847; Manchester Times 11 Sept. 1847; Richard Wright Proctor, Memorials of Bygone Manchester [1880], 246-50) AA