Author: Hill, Robert
Biography:
HILL, Robert (d 1808?: ancestry.com)
No birth record has been found. He signed the preface of Poems on Several Occasions (1775) from Greenwich, and his 13-page list of subscribers is full of Greenwich names. The reviews scoffed at its plebeian character but it contains the names of patrons and professional staff of the Greenwich Hospital (for naval pensioners) and clergymen as well as the “barbers, bakers, butchers,” etc. that the reviews made fun of. (It does not include any Hills or Paynes.) The same list is more interesting to today’s literary historians than the body of work, and it is true that the couplets are clumsy. Hill, who describes himself as “a youthful Bard,” took for his subjects the English authors he most admired (Dryden, Pope, Addison, Waller, Congreve et al.) and foreign writers such as Virgil, Fenelon, and Voltaire whom he read in translation; the beauties of Greenwich Park; the dangers of intoxication; and the pastimes of young ladies. The opening poem is “The Temple of Hymen.” Given his working-class milieu and his obvious local attachment, it seems quite likely that he was Robert Hill, a painter and a bachelor, who married Ann Payne on 14 Jul. 1770 at St. Alfege, Greenwich, and then as a widower married Maria Groome on 10 Feb. 1807 at the same church. He was buried at St. Alfege on 18 Oct. 1808. It is not known whether there were children. Rather sadly, an advertisement at the back of his only publication lists his “compleat” works, none of which seems ever to have been printed: they include “Saladine, a Tragedy,” “Almanzor and Izmene, a Tragedy,” “The Adventures of Hermogenus, Twenty Books,” four other titles, “and several Miscellanies.” (ancestry.com 4 Jul. 2022; findmypast.com 4 Jul. 2022; CR 39 [1775] 340-1; MR 52 [1775] 273) HJ