Author: Lucas, Charles
Biography:
LUCAS, Charles (1769-1854: ODNB)
He was born on 19 Apr. 1769 and baptised at Daventry, Northants., on 29 June, the third child of William Lucas and his wife Sarah Lawrence, who had married at St. Giles in the Fields, Holborn, London, on 12 Jan. 1761. He was educated in Salisbury before proceeding to Harrow and Oriel College, Oxford, in 1786. He styled himself A.M. on the title pages of his works but there is no record of his receiving a degree in the Oxford registers. He became Curate of Avebury, Wilts., in 1791. He married Sarah Ann(e) Williams on 5 Jan. 1803 at All Cannings, Wilts. They had at least four daughters and two sons, four of whom are mentioned in his will. He left Avebury to become Curate at Devizes, Wilts. (1816-33), where he died on 13 Nov. 1854 and was buried at St. John the Baptist on 20 Nov. Apart from the verse listed here, he was the author of several novels, one of which, The Infernal Quixote (Minerva Press 1801), with its anti-jacobin ideas and background of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, has attracted modern interest. Looking back on the novel in 1820, he characterised it as “written against the modern principles of atheism and licentiousness, disguised as philosophy and liberty” (Gwelygordd [1820] 1: 5). His first novel, The Castle of St. Donat’s (1798), warned of the dangers of dissipation, suicide and seduction in modern novels; The Abissinian Reformer (1808) championed liberty and Christianity. Less lively and now completely forgotten is his Observations on the Modern Clergy and the Present State of the Church (1820). (ODNB 10 Jun. 2022; ancestry.co.uk 10 Jun. 2022; Watkins; Morning Chronicle 21 Nov. 1854; M. O. Grenby, ed., The Infernal Quixote [2004]; Charles Lucas, Gwelygorrd; or, The Child of Sin [1820], Introductory Chapter) AA