Author: Jacobson, James
Biography:
JACOBSON, James (1777-1857: ancestry.com)
James Jacobson of Bearsted, Kent, was baptised in the Presbyterian church at Maidstone on 3 Mar. 1777, the son of James Jacobson and his wife, Ann. From 1825, he was deputy lieutenant for Kent. As magistrate, he oversaw prosecutions that followed the 1830 Swing Riots. Awkwardly, his brother-in-law, brevet major Charles Wayth of the 17th light dragoons (d 1852), was a leading parliamentary reform agitator. Three times in his poem “The Evening Walk” he refers to his friendship with “my Charles.” Charles was himself a poet, the author of Trout Fishing; or the River Darent. A Rural Poem (1845). In the 1840s and 1850s, Jacobson lived in Snowfield, a house erected by him in Bearsted in about 1839 (now a grade II listed building). He died, unmarried, in the Wayths’ house on 30 Apr. 1857. The publisher Cadell and Davies heavily advertised his poem, Tobias, and had it “Elegantly printed in a Pocket Volume.” Sales were insufficient to warrant a second edition. The title had a single reviewer, a writer in the Literary Chronicle, who liked his “unassuming volume” for its morality and “good sense.” (ancestry.com 31 Oct. 2023; geoffsgenealogy.co.uk 31 Oct. 2023; Dr Williams’ Birth Register, National Archives RG4/4659, no. 1587; Literary Chronicle 114 [21 July 1821], 45; Farmer’s Magazine 5 [1836], 181; C. Greenwood, An Epitome of County History [1838], 1:166; Topography of Maidstone [1839], 75; The London Catalogue of Books [1853], 107; GM 202 [June 1857], 740) JC