Author: Marryat, Thomas
Biography:
MARRYAT, Thomas (1730-92: ODNB)
His year of birth is usually given as 1730 although no record has been located. His parents were Anne Kidley and her husband, Zephaniah Marryat, a dissenting minister of Huguenot descent who was pastor of the Presbyterian church on Union Street, London, from 1710 until his death in 1754. Thomas Marryat was known for his eccentric appearance and inventive wit. In 1747-49 he belonged to a literary club that met each Wednesday to read verse with the poems subsequently being submitted to Edward Cave for publication in the GM; the club was the first to propose a “Monthly Review,” an idea later successfully developed by Ralph Griffiths. He trained for the Presbyterian ministry and in 1754 he was ordained at Southwold, Suffolk, where he married Sarah Davy. Their first son, Joseph, was father to the novelist Frederick Marryat. Being a minister did not suit Marryat’s temperament; two publications—Medical Aphorisms (1757) and Therapeutics, a New Practice of Physic (1758)—signalled his interest in medicine and he abruptly left his congregation in 1760. ODNB states there is no evidence for his studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh but he travelled in Europe and America seeking to practice as a physician. He moved to the north of Ireland in 1766 before returning to England in 1774 where he settled in Bristol in about 1785. His Therapeutics went through numerous editions under different titles and with new prefatory material but he struggled financially and his Philosophy of Masons (1790) was deemed offensive even by his friends. He died at Bristol on 29 May 1792 and was interred in the burial grounds of the Presbyterian chapel in Lewin's Mead, Brunswick Square. (ODNB 15 Sept. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 15 Sept. 2021; C. Lennart Carlson, “Edward Cave’s Literary Club, and its Project for a Literary Review,” Philological Quarterly 17 (1938) 115-20; Walter Wilson, History and Antiquities of the Dissenting Churches 4 [1808]) SR
Other Names:
- T. Marryat