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Author: Kemp, Alexander

Biography:

KEMP, Alexander (fl 1791-1823) pseudonym Albert

Nothing is known about his family, nor has his place of birth in Scotland been identified. In about 1791 he moved to Ireland and became a schoolteacher at Coleraine. He published verse in periodicals as “Albert” or “Albert of Coleraine” and was a friend of Samuel Thomson (q.v.). In 1799 he moved to London where he made a living writing juvenile literature and for the periodical press. In 1823 he wrote to Walter Scott to say that he had a manuscript of poems ready for the press and was seeking subscriptions. In the same letter he described writing hundreds of advertising jingles for Warren’s Blacking; Mr. Slum in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop is said to have been based on Kemp. The book of poems seems never to have been published. The letter to Scott is dated from Whitecross Street, London, and possibly he was the pauper Alexander Kemp who died in 1833 and was buried at St. Botolph’s without Bishopsgate. (ancestry.co.uk 19 Apr. 2021; W. Partington, “The Blacking Laureate,” The Dickensian 34 [1938] 199-20; Jennifer Orr, Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Romantic Period Ireland [2015])

 

Books written (1):

Belfast: printed by Hu K. Gordon, 1814