Author: Hoyle, Charles
Biography:
HOYLE, Charles (1772-1848: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 1 Sept. 1772 at Halifax, Yorkshire, the second child and only son of Robert Hoyle and his wife Ellen Whitehead, who had married in 1765. He was educated at Hipperholme school and entered Trinity College Cambridge in 1789 (Scholar 1792, BA 1794, MA 1797). He won the Seatonian Prize in 1804 and 1806 with poems listed here. From 1803 to 1809 he was College Librarian, before leaving to take up the living as Vicar of Overton, Wiltshire, in 1813. He remained there until his death on 13 Nov. 1848. He left a small estate of under £450 to his elder unmarried sister, Anne, who died not long afterwards in 1850. In addition to his Seatonian poems on sacred subjects, he wrote a long epic in thirteen books, Exodus (1807). He returned to writing poetry twenty years later with two travel-topographical poems on Ireland and Scotland, Three Days at Killarney (1828) and The Pilgrim of the Hebrides (1830). He appears to have been on good terms with George Crabbe and William Lisle Bowles (qq.v.) who lived about fifty miles west of Overton, at Trowbridge and Bremhill respectively, and who may have helped in revising his later works. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Dec. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 3 Dec. 2021; Spenserians; LES 21 Nov. 1848; GM Feb. 1849, 213) AA