Author: Jenner, Charles
Biography:
JENNER, Charles (1736-1774: ODNB)
Baptised 1 May 1736 at St Clement Danes, Westminster, London, he was the eldest child of the Rev. Dr. Charles Jenner, chaplain to the king, and his wife, Mary. His mother was a daughter of John Sawyer of Heywood Lodge, Berkshire, and his wife, Sarah Dickens. His great-grandfather, Sir Thomas Jenner, was a baron of the exchequer. On 14 Apr. 1753, he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a pensioner (BA 1757, MA 1760), and in 1763 migrated to Sussex College. Promoted rapidly in the church, he benefited from his father’s Lincolnshire connections. John Thomas, bishop of Lincoln, ordained him deacon on 25 Dec. 1758, priest on 1 June 1760. His was licensed on 25 Dec. 1758 at All Saints, Buckworth, Huntingdonshire, as curate to his father, the church’s rector. From 29 Dec. 1766 to his death, he lived at Cranford, Northamptonshire, as rector of an advowson, the church of St John, in the patronage of the bishop of Lincoln. In 1769, he was appointed domestic chaplain to John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, and, in the same year, as vicar at Claybrook, Leicestershire. Also in 1769, he was licensed as “preacher throughout the diocese of Lincoln.” In 1764 at the parish church of St John the Baptist, Somersham, Huntingdonshire, he married Rebecca (d 1771), a daughter of William Thomson and his wife, Rebecca (Blatt) Thomson. There were no children by the marriage. His most successful literary endeavor was a novel of sensibility, published anonymously, The Placid Man; or, Memoirs of Sir C. Belville (1770, 2d edn 1773); in it he defends novel reading. He dedicated The Man of Family: A Sentimental Comedy to David Garrick (q.v.). He was awarded the Seaton prize, twice, for The Gift of Tongues (1766) and for The Destruction of Nineveh (1768). Critics of his poetry gave him no encouragement: “stiff, laboured language, confused and bloated metaphors” (Scots Magazine, 1767); “heaviness, insipidity … more affection and conceit than genuine wit” (MR, 1772). Following a brief illness, he died at Claybrook on 11 May 1774. (ODNB 23 Nov. 2023; CCEd 23 Nov. 2023; Cambridge Chronicle, 21 May 1774; E. Brydges, Restituta: or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old Books [1815], 3:77) JC