Author: LEWIS, David
Biography:
LEWIS, David (1768-1848: ancestry.com)
David Lewis lived and died in Knaresborough, Yorkshire. He was baptised on 24 Sept. 1768 at the church of St. John the Baptist. His father was John Lewis, his mother’s name is not recorded. He began his working life as a labourer, but he learnt to read and write and eventually became a schoolteacher. Many of his poems reflect his employment in farmwork and gardening. According to Yorkshire Poets he at one point “occupied Belmont Farm” near the town. If so, he married a woman named Hannah and with her had a son, Richard, who was born on 11 Feb. 1809; but on the day of his baptism at St. John the Baptist, 10 Apr. 1809, with his father David identified as “Farmer, Bellmont,” his mother Hannah was buried. She was probably the Hannah Calverley who married David Lewis on 8 Nov. 1804 at Leeds—although the marriage record states that both were “of this parish” and that he was a weaver, so perhaps not. Richard Lewis (1809-58) stayed on in Knaresborough, became a stone mason, and had a family of his own. The 1841 census shows David Lewis living alone and giving his occupation as “Schoolmaster.” Lewis’s publications were strongly linked to the Hargrove family of Knaresborough, who printed his first collection in 1798. Before then he was very likely one of the anonymous contributors to their Trifles from Harrogate (1797). Their editions of Specimens of the Yorkshire Dialect (1808 and later) include three of his longer narrative poems, under his name: other versions of this title are listed as his only when they are known to include his work, which was not always suitably acknowledged. (Contents vary significantly from one edition to another, some are undated, and a few that remain unexamined might contain his work.) He died at Knaresborough and was buried at St. John the Baptist on 20 Apr. 1848. (ancestry.com 13 Jan. 2024; findmypast.com 13 Jan. 2024; Yorkshire Poets 4: 95; Goodridge) HJ