Author: Hickie, D. B.
Biography:
HICKIE, Daniel Banfield (c. 1790-1867: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in Ireland but the names of his parents are not known and public records for his life are scarce. In the 1851 Census, his birthplace is given as Wexford, Ireland, and his age as 60. However, his Poems of the Amatory and Legendary Kind includes verses described as from a manuscript play that was performed in Clonmel in 1811 and O’Donoghue states on the basis of other evidence that he was probably from Clonmel, County Tipperary. On 10 Mar. 1819 he wrote a letter from the Round Tower, Dublin Castle, to Walter Scott (q.v.), sending a prospectus for a proposed poetic translation of Anacreon and Sappho and seeking a subscription. Scott’s reply from 31 Mar. declines to comment on the quality of the verse, agrees to subscribe, and advises him “to publish in such a shape as to insure a return of profit, as some compensation for adopting the thriftless occupation of a poet.” Hickie evidently attended university but the only record found is for his LL.D. from the University of Glasgow in 1828. Before then, in 1825, he was working as a teacher in Great Yarmouth where he was initiated into the Masonic lodge on 2 June 1825. In 1829 he was appointed headmaster of the Hawkshead Grammar School. The school was founded in the sixteenth century by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, but the endowment had been negligently maintained, and Hickie took an active role in retrieving several properties that had been lost to the school. He married Catherine Chambers from Euston, Suffolk; she had been widowed in 1811 but the date of her marriage to Hickie is not known. They had no children together but two daughters from her first marriage lived with them in Hawkshead. Hickie published numerous translations and school texts but he seems to have struggled with managing his finances: in 1842-43 he declared bankruptcy. He died in Hawkshead on 21 Jan. 1867 and was interred in the Hawkshead cemetery on 26 Jan.; the record for his death gives his age as 82, indicating a birth year earlier than given in the various censuses. His will left effects of under £100. (ancestry.co.uk 12 Jan. 2022; Roll of the Graduates of the University of Glasgow [1898]; York Herald 14 Jan. 1843; Kendal Mercury 25 Mar. 1843; H. S. Cowper, Hawkshead (the Northernmost Parish of Lancashire) [1899]; Herbert Grierson, ed. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 5 [1933], 330-31) SR
Other Names:
- D. B. Hickie