Author: KINGLAKE, William Chapman
Biography:
KINGLAKE, William Chapman (1807-81: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 2 Apr. 1807 and baptised on 1 June at Taunton, Somerset, the youngest son of Robert Kinglake, M.D. (1765-1842) and his wife Joanna Apperley (1764-1850) who had married at Calcott, Somerset, on 5 Nov. 1798. He was educated at Rev. Edward Coleridge’s preparatory school at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, where he displayed a natural ability in Classics. He proceeded to Eton where he contributed several poems to the college magazine, The Etonian, alongside his friend W. M. Praed (q.v.), and his Latin verse was much admired by the Headmaster, Dr. John Keate. He then went to Laleham, Surrey, where he became a favourite pupil of Dr. Thomas Arnold, later Headmaster of Rugby. A gap of three years ensued due to ill health before he went up to Trinity College Cambridge (BA 1834, MA 1841) and, possibly mindful of the earlier fate of another precocious poet, Henry Kirke White (q.v.), he was discouraged from overworking. At college he was friends with Bulwer and Tennyson (qq.v.) and remained on good terms with them throughout his life. He twice won the Chancellor’s medal for English poetry: Byzantium (1830) and The Taking of Jerusalem in the First Crusade (1832). Neither poem was published independently and the texts, although widely available in the original Prolusiones printings and reprints in later collections of the Chancellor’s medal poems, are Kinglake’s only known works. Despite his early promise and distinguished reputation, he spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity as Rector of West Monkton, Somerset (1838-81), with a comfortable income of £500 p.a. He married Matilda Chapman (1807-89), possibly a distant cousin, on 24 Nov. 1832, at North Petherton, Somerset. They had two daughters who reached maturity and married and a son who died in his first year. He died on 30 Sept. 1881 at Shovell Hill, North Petherton, leaving an estate of around £2,200. (ancestry.co.uk 25 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 25 Apr. 2022; “Kinglake, Robert,” ODNB 25 Apr. 2022; CCEd 25 Apr. 2022; GM Nov. 1798, 992; Cambridge Chronicle 30 Nov. 1832; Taunton Courier 12 Oct. 1881; Truth 13 Oct. 1881) AA