Author: Jackson, Samuel Richard
Biography:
JACKSON, Samuel Richard (1795? d 1845: ancestry.com)
Jackson was perhaps the son of George and Elizabeth Jackson, born 24 Jan. 1795 in London, baptised 22 Mar. 1795 at St George, Hanover Square. He was educated well enough to find employment as a clerk in the London Docks Company where he worked from about 1807 until his dismissal in 1831. At the Company, he earned between a guinea and 24s per week, at most about £100 per annum (now about £15,000). On 12 Jan. 1818 at St John, Southwark, he married Jane Wright, with whom he had eight children. Paying in 1826 to have his poem Ahab printed “plunged him into great difficulty.” The poem was poorly reviewed and it did not sell; the National Magazine’s “we are far from saying [it] is utterly destitute of merit” is a typical judgment. William Hone (q.v.) arranged patronage from the Rev. Christopher Benson, Master of the Temple, but that proved insufficient, so in 1831 he appealed to the RLF for relief and was granted £15. Subsequently, he was unemployed for two years before he opened a small shop that failed. Then, in 1839, he was imprisoned for debt in Horsemonger’s Lane. He had recently appealed to the RLF, without success because the secretary of the London Docks Company, J. D. Powles (a business associate of Benjamin Disraeli (q.v.) and the publisher John Murray), denied that Jackson had been dismissed merely for having mislaid “a formal paper,” which is what he had told the RLF. Signing himself “S.R.J.,” he published poetry in the Cambro-Briton, the Weekly Chronicle, Belle Assemblée, the Literary Gazette, the Monthly Mirror, and the United Service Magazine. His poems appeared in collections, in The Cambrian Wreath (1828) and Hone’s The Table Book, The Every-Day Book, and The Year Book. Leigh Hunt published his “A Last Wish” in the London Journal. His long poem “The Fate of Poets” appeared in the Literary Speculum. In 1830, Jackson announced in the Cambrian and Caledonian Quarterly that he was preparing a new book, “Odes and Melodies Connected with Welsh History.” It did not appear. He died in Gray’s Hospital on 5 May 1845 following seventeen months of illness. (ancestry.com 1 June 2023; findmypast.com 2 June 2023; RLF file 709; “Select Committee on Customs,” Parliamentary Papers [1851], 350) JC
Other Names:
- S. R. Jackson