Author: Jarman, Richard
Biography:
JARMAN, Richard (1807-77: findmypast.com)
Although his statement for the census of 1851 gives his birth year as 1808, his age at death and parish records indicate rather that it was 1807. He was baptised at St. Mary, Whitechapel, London, on 4 Sept. 1807, the son of Robert and Amelia Jarman. He trained as an engraver and joined the Unitarians; he contributed verse occasionally to periodicals. On 26 May 1830 he married Ann Busher in Stepney, London, and they had eight children together between 1834 and 1850. When he published his only known poem, Omnipotence! in 1831, he made the tactical error of revealing in a preface that most of it had been composed when he was 19, and hostile reviewers seized on that fact, calling it “puerile,” “presumptuous,” and “beneath criticism.” By the time of the 1851 census, after having lived in various London boroughs, the family were living in Bow, Middlesex, and Jarman gave his occupation as that of a “map and commercial” engraver. In 1857 they emigrated to Hobart Town, Tasmania, where he successfully re-established himself as a commercial and cartographic engraver; was engaged as a writing master at several schools; and found outlets for his poems, tales, and essays in local papers. He died at home on Forest Town Road on 12 May 1877. (findmypast.com 26 Dec. 2024; ancestry.com 26 Dec. 2024; “Richard Jarman,” Design and Art Australia Online, daao.org.au 26 Dec. 2024; MR [1831], 223; Ladies’ Museum [1831], 232; The Englishman [1831], 253; Monthly Repository 5 [1831], 347-8) HJ