Author: Jago, Richard
Biography:
JAGO, Richard (1715-1781: ODNB)
Jago’s literary life is allied with that of his schoolfellow the poet William Shenstone and other members of Lady Luxborough’s Warwickshire intellectual circle. He was born on 1 Oct. 1715 at Beaudesert, Warwick, the third son of the Rev. Richard Jago (1669-1741) and his wife, Margaret (d 1745), daughter of William Parker of Henley. Taught initially by his father and the poet William Somerville, he was educated under a severe master, “Mr. Crompton,” at Solihull, a school infamous for declining to employ Samuel Johnson (q.v.). Prior to his ordination, he attended University College, Oxford (BA 1736, MA 1739). He was, successively, curate of Snitterfield (1737), where he spent most of his adult life; of Lapworth (1739); Harbury and Chesterton (1746-1771); and Kilncote, Leicester (1771). At Combrook on 17 Aug. 1743 he married Dorothy, a daughter of his father’s friend the Rev. Richard Fancourt, of Kimcote, Leicester. The marriage produced seven children. Dorothy having died in 1752, on 16 Oct. 1758 at Rugeley, Stafford, he married Margaret (1711-1799), a daughter of James Underwood. His earliest published poems appeared in The Adventurer (volume 37, 1753) and in the Pall Mall publisher J. Dodsley’s six-volume A Collection of Poems (1758). His major poem, Edge-Hill, published by Dodsley in May 1767, was proposed for publication by subscription in Dec. 1765. An MR reviewer complained that the poet’s historical, philosophical, and “moral Reflections” are insufficiently integrated with his depictions of nature. The subscription list (more than 400 names) consists of middle-class academics and professionals, senior clergy, titled gentry, aristocrats, and book societies. Henry James Pye, Rowland Hill, and George Huddersford’s father were subscribers (qq.v.) as was the New York loyalist and diarist George Folliott. Also in 1767, he collaborated with the author of The Spiritual Quixote, Richard Graves (q.v.), in the publication of Shenstone’s letters. His fable, Labour and Genius (Dodsley, 1768), is “chiefly on the genius and taste of … Shenstone.” A writer in London Magazine called the fable the product of “an elegant pen and a happy imagination.” Dodsley also published Jago’s Poems Moral and Descriptive (1784), which includes an enlarged version of Edge-Hill. He died at Snitterfield on 8 May 1781 and is buried in the family vault at St James the Great. (ODNB 23 July 2023; CCEd 24 July 2023; PROB 11/1078; Alumni Oxonienses; D. Lind, Richard Jago: a Study in Eighteenth Century Localism [1945]) JC
Other Names:
- R. Jago