Author: Martin, Henry
Biography:
MARTIN, Henry (1801-58: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 8 July 1801 and baptised on 21 Oct. at St. John’s, Deritend and Bordesley, Birmingham, Warwickshire, the eldest child of Henry Martin and Mary Simcox, who had married at Aston Juxta, Birmingham, in 1800. He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Birmingham, and became an engraver, but was more interested in literature and newspapers. He worked as a sub-editor of the Worcester Journal in the late 1820s before becoming the proprietor and printer of the Yorkshire Halifax Express from 1832 until its demise in 1842. Thereafter he edited a couple of penny weeklies, the Free Press and The Reformer. These also failed and he retired around 1856. He was active in civic life in Halifax as a liberal and dissenter, and was a director of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institution. He died on 26 Sept. 1858 at Halifax, three weeks after visiting his younger brother, the New Zealand judge William Martin (1807-80) in London, where he caught “infection of the Thames.” He left an estate of under £450 to his wife, Maria Bidlake (1791-1881), whom he had married on 21 Sept. 1833, at St. John’s, Hackney, London. There were no children. His Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems (1830) was printed in Birmingham and dedicated to his maternal uncle, John Simcox, attorney, of Camp-Hill House, Birmingham. It became mostly known for its “Miserrimus” sonnet commemorating Thomas Morris, a minor canon in Worcester Cathedral, whose memorial stone had also moved Wordsworth to write a sonnet (“A Gravestone Upon the Floor in the Cloisters of Worcester Cathedral,” The Keepsake [1829], 156). The volume also contained four sonnets on “Poesy” and two on the French Revolution of 1830. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Feb. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 24 Feb. 2024; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 1 Dec. 1800, 23 Sept. 1833; Halifax Courier 2 Oct. 1858; DNZB [William Martin] 24 Feb. 2024; GRO death cert.; Burton R. Pollin, Wordsworth Circle 1 [1970], 22-4) AA