Author: Lathy, Thomas Pike
Biography:
LATHY, Thomas Pike (1771-1825: ODNB)
Pseudonym Piscator
No official record of birth or baptism has been found, but he was born in Exeter in 1771, the son of Mary (Kent) Lathy and Richard Hayman Lathy, an apothecary. On 12 Sept. 1787 he was articled as a clerk to an attorney for five years. It is not clear how he passed from there to the Boston stage, but he did. On 15 Apr. 1799 “Thomas P. Lathy of the Federal St. Theatre” married Sally King Johns in Boston. In 1800 his play Reparation, or The School for Libertines was performed and published in Boston. Lathy returned to England and settled in London with his wife; they had at least three children. (ODNB is mistaken in assigning him a second wife, Sarah: “Sally” is a nickname for Sarah.) He produced five novels in short order between 1805 and 1809; Watkins credits him with four more but modern scholarship rejects those attributions. In 1819 he published three volumes of Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV, dedicated to the Prince Regent. In the same year appeared The Angler, by “Piscator,” to which Lathy put his own name in the 2nd edition of 1822 although the work had been quickly exposed as essentially a plagiarism of an earlier work, Thomas Scott’s The Anglers: Eight Dialogues in Verse (1758). The last address of the Lathy family was Seymour St., London. Sarah Lathy died in Jan. 1825, aged 45, and was buried at St. Marylebone, London, on 9 Jan.; he followed, aged 54, and was buried on 2 Sept. of the same year. (ODNB 3 Dec. 2023; ancestry.com 3 Dec. 2023; findmypast.com 3 Dec. 2023; EN2; Watkins; Baker) HJ
Other Names:
- T. P. Lathy