Author: Lackington, James
Biography:
LACKINGTON, James (1746-1815: ODNB)
Born in Scott’s Lane, Wellington, Somerset, on 31 Aug 1746, the eldest of the eleven children of George Lackington, shoemaker, and his wife, Joan Trott, a weaver’s daughter, at age fourteen years, six months he was bound apprentice to a Taunton shoemaker. In 1768, friends purchased his freedom, whereupon he moved to Bristol. There, on 31 Dec. 1770, at St Peter’s Church, he married dairymaid Ann Smith (whom he called “Nancy”) of North Petherton. She died in 1775 shortly after their move to London and on 30 Jan. 1776 in St Luke’s, Finsbury, he married Dorcas (1750-1795), a schoolmistress, the daughter of Samuel Turton of Staffordshire. At St Mary, Olveston, Gloucester, on 11 June in the same year that Dorcas died, he married her cousin Mary (1765-1850). She was a sister of Dr William Turton (1762-1835: ODNB), physician to John Keats’s brother Tom. (Mary outlived each of her five husbands.) From 1774, he traded in remaindered and discounted books (he advertised his firm as the “Cheapest booksellers in the word”). With the great wealth he accumulated, in 1794 he opened an enormous shop in Finsbury Square, nicknamed “The Temple of the Muses”. In his “Ode to the Hero of Finsbury Square”, he comically praised himself and his bookstore: “Had ever Bookseller a Shop so spacious? / Had e’er the World, since Science first began, / So great a Trader, or so great a Man?” He published a volume of Memoirs in 1791. When he retired, in 1798, to Thornbury, near Alveston, his third cousin, George (1777-1844), took over the business. Lackington was a committed Methodist, the builder of several Methodist chapels. He attended his first meeting in 1782, fell away from Methodism for a time, then, in 1804, published Confessions to apologize for having criticized his denomination. In 1807, he moved to Budleigh Salterton, Devon, where he built a manor house, Ash Villa. There he died, childless, on 22 Nov 1815. He is buried in East Budleigh. Lackington was a friend of the satirist John Wolcot (q.v.). (ODNB 29 Apr. 2023; ancestry.com 28 Apr. 2023; PROB 11/1578; Taunton Courier, 5 May 1841; Western Times, 12 Jan. 1850) JC