Author: Lake, James Wabon
Biography:
LAKE, James Wabon (1787-1855: ancestry.co.uk)
James Wabon Lake was born on 18 Apr. 1787 and baptised on 9 May at St. Giles, Cripplegate, the son of Robert Lake, coachman, and his wife Ann Wabon. He was in Lynn, Norfolk in 1810 but seems to have moved to London by 1813. Around 1816 he moved to Paris, for reasons unknown. Throughout the 1810s he contributed poems and songs to newspapers, mostly to the Morning Post, but he began to work for the Galignani brothers in the 1820s, first on their English newspaper and then on their editions of English poets and novels. Lake wrote the introductory memoirs to editions of Moore (1827) and Scott (1827) in addition to his life of Byron (1826) and, as he said later, “Most of the best British works published in the Continent have passed the ordeal of my grey-goose quill” (RLF 1/572/5/ALS 6 Mar. 1833). This raises the important question of what his role was in the production of the two famous Galignani editions of Romantic Poets--Wordsworth (1828) and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (1829)--and Baudry’s The Living Poets of England (1827), reissued (with alterations and additions and the review material replaced by new biographies) as British Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1828). Despite his many years on “the professional literary Tread-Mill“ in Paris, he struggled financially and eventually returned to England around 1837. Plagued by ill-health and poverty, he applied many times to the RLF and had the support of Thomas Moore, John Bowring, Laman Blanchard (qq.v.) and others. He received various amounts of £5-£25 (in total £155). In 1840 he wanted to return to Paris but never managed to do so. In London he mostly lived in Soho with his wife, Ann Bassompierre, whom he had probably married in Paris. (Their two children predeceased them.) In 1848, he was the beneficiary of £2000 from a cousin who had died in a Lunatic Asylum, so his final years were easier. He died, completely forgotten, on 17 Apr. 1855 at 57 Great Portland Street, and was buried at All Souls Kensal Green. His wife had died the previous month. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Feb. 2021; RLF 1/572; Moore, Letters [1964] 2: 811-12) AA
Other Names:
- J. W. Lake