Author: LENTON, Edward
Biography:
LENTON, Edward (1812-28: findmypast.co.uk)
He was born on 12 Oct. 1812 and baptised on 8 Nov. at St. Mary’s, Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the youngest son of Charles Lenton (1770-1819), a farmer, and his second wife, Frances Young (1772-1816), who had married the previous year. His obituary claimed that after the early deaths of his parents, “his mind naturally became tinctured with melancholy retrospection.” He was probably then brought up by relatives. At an early age he was apprenticed to attorneys, first in Spalding and then in Alford. He died, aged 15, probably from consumption, on 11 June 1828 and was buried three days later at Alford. His poems are mostly notable for his meditations on his impending death: “The Bed of the Dead,” “Remember Me,” “Retrospective Musings,” “Ode to Death,” and “Elegy.” The obituary claim that his name should be added to those of “Chatterton, Keates, Kirke White, and Wolfe” is just local hyperbole. How the poems came to be published five years after his death by the local rogue and workhouse poet William Jevons Baitman (q.v.), is not known. Baitman printed further poems and a prose fragment by Lenton in Poetics and Prosaics (1835). (findmypast.co.uk 1 Apr. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 1 Apr. 2024; Stamford Mercury 20 June 1828; Boston Gazette 8 July 1828, reprinted as “Memoir” in Harpings of Lena [1833],141-44) AA