Author: Jackson, Richard
Biography:
JACKSON, Richard (b c. 1780 d aft. 1851: ancestry.com)
There are few verifiable facts about “Richard Jackson, Master of the Academy in Little Compton Street, Soho,” the author of Ruth; or the Fair Moabitess; thus, the frequent use in what follows of “may,” “perhaps,” and “possibly.” He states in a preface that he composed these juvenilia about thirteen years earlier. He was perhaps the son of Richard Jackson and his wife, Elizabeth, born 16 Nov. 1780, baptised 17 Dec. 1780, in St James church in Clerkenwell, Islington. Assuming that identification is correct, his parents’ only other child, Thomas, was born on 28 Sept. 1781. A Thomas Jackson, machinist, possibly the author’s brother, had a business in Compton Street in the 1820s. Plausibly, the author apprenticed under Isaac Fleury, who was master of an academy in Little Compton Street in 1805. His own school mastership commenced sometime before 1810 and lasted at least until 1849. He may have been the Richard Jackson who married Martha Stanton at Saint Anne, Soho, on 5 July 1802. If so, he may have had a second wife, Elizabeth George, married in the same church on 19 Aug. 1821. In 1811, a Richard Jackson was resident in Golden Ball Court, Soho, in the same street as Henry Jackson, a machinist, perhaps a cousin. The only other trace of him is in Mechanics’ Magazine, to which he contributed communications from 1824 through 1851. They include “Prevention of Friction in Calendering [of cotton prints],” “Geological Antiquities,” “Mechanical Genius,” “The End of the World,” “Safety Joints in Carriages,” “Neglect of Native Talent,” “Instructing Working Classes,” “Measuring Timber,” “Concrete Cocoa-Nut Oil,” and “On Mathematics and English Grammar.” In the latter contribution, he amusingly defines “participle” as “a mongrel form of the verb.” (ancestry.com 27 Oct. 2023; findmypast.com 27 Oct. 2023; Mechanics’ Magazine [1824-1851]) JC