Author: JEWITT, Arthur George
Biography:
JEWITT, Arthur George (1794-1828: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 1 June and baptised 11 June 1794 at Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the eldest of seventeen children of Arthur Jewitt (1772-1852), topographer, engraver, printer, and sometime schoolmaster, and his wife Martha Sheldon (1773-1835), who had married in 1793. He was apprenticed to Adam Stark, printer and stationer, at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. He early showed a keen interest in poetry and displayed “an uncontrollable tendency to ‘melancholy and discontent’, for which he was surprised he could not find a cure . . . His Sabbaths were generally spent in walks or journeys, not in the house of God” (Hannah, 314). He was gradually led to conversion or “that deep humiliation of heart which is the first step to true wisdom” by a serious of emotional experiences beginning with the death in 1813 of Jane Stark, the wife of his employer. A reading of Kirke White (q.v.), the fated Nottingham poet who moved from poetry to devotion towards the end of his life, also affected him. Kirke White led him to Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736) and thereafter he embraced Wesleyan Methodism and later became a minister and itinerant preacher. He was active in the Sunday School at Gainsborough and formed a prayer group with friends. In 1814 he was admitted as a probationary preacher and appointed to the Gainsborough circuit. In 1816 Hull District Meeting appointed him an itinerant preacher at Witney where he remained for a year before preaching at on the Banbury (Oxfordshire), Manningtree (Essex) and Sleaford (Lincolnshire) circuits. He married Anne Borwell (1795-1841) on 2 Aug. 1820 at Gainsborough. He continued to preach on various circuits: Banff, Paisley, Horncastle, Reading, Wolverhampton. He also began to contribute poetry and prose to the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine and Youth’s Instructor. Between 1825 and 1827 he showed signs of consumption and collapsed on 5 Nov. 1828. He never recovered and died on 17 Nov. 1828, aged 35, and was buried at All Saints, Gainsborough. Anne Jewitt died at Ardwick, Manchester, in 1841. His only published work, listed here, was printed by his father, Arthur Jewitt (1772-1852) with engraved illustrations by his younger brother, Orlando Sheldon Jewitt (1799-1869). (ancestry.co.uk 13 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 13 Aug. 2022; ODNB [father, brother] 13 Aug. 2022; Stamford Mercury 11 Aug. 1820; Staffordshire Advertiser 29 Nov. 1828; Manchester Times 15 May 1841; Rev. John Hannah, “Memoir,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine May 1833, 313-322) AA