Author: Johns, Henry Incledon
Biography:
JOHNS, Henry Incledon (1776-1851: “Memoir”)
He was born on 1 Feb. 1776 and baptised on 31 Mar. at Helston, Cornwall, the son of Bennet(t) John (sic), a surveyor and architect, and his wife Ann(e) Jenkyn, who had married the previous year. He left school at fifteen and delighted in open-air reading of poets such as Thomson, Pope, Goldsmith and Gray (qq.v.). He displayed an early talent for drawing but his father steered him towards a commercial career and found him a post as clerk at a bank. He married Maria Boone on 2 May 1803 at Stoke Damerel, Devon. They went on to have fifteen children (with several infant mortalities). In Poems (1832) he mentions seven children and in his 1833 RLF application, nine. He rose to become joint partner with Thomas Clinton Shiells in the Plymouth Dock Bank (1790-1825) also known as Devonport Bank and as Shiells and Johns. The financial crisis of Oct. 1825 closed the bank and bankrupted him. He was forced to move from his elegant residence in Fore Street, Plymouth, to a smaller house in Park Street where he would remain for the rest of his life. Thereafter he returned to his passion for drawing, advertised for pupils, and listed himself as Professor of Drawing in Plymouth New Grammar School. He had earlier assisted Thomas Hewitt Williams in his Picturesque Excursions in Devonshire and Cornwall (1804). With such a large family, he never escaped respectable poverty; he applied to the Royal Literary Fund for assistance in 1832-3 and 1850 and was given three awards of £10, £30, and £20. However, his children established their own careers as artists, schoolmasters, bank clerks, and governesses. In 1833 he lost the use of his right hand and from 1846 until his death he was bed-ridden, with his daughter Julia acting on his behalf in dealings with the RLF in 1850. He died on 20 Feb. 1851 at his home in Park Street. Maria Johns also died there in 1855. (“Memoir” prefixed to Poems [1832] 1-38; RLF 1/740; Western Courier 26 Feb. 1851; Deirdre Dare and Melissa Hardie, A Passion for Nature: 19th-Century Naturalism in the Circle of Charles Alexander Johns [2008]) AA