Author: Mason, Abraham John
Biography:
MASON, Abraham John (1794-1858: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in the Goswell Road, Clerkenwell, London, on 4 Apr. 1794 and baptised 27 Apr. at St. Luke’s Old Street, Finsbury, the son of Abraham John Mason (1757-97), backmaker (wooden vat maker) and Christian Thomas (1754-1803), who had married in 1780. Both his parents died of consumption, his father in 1797 and his mother in 1803. He was sent to Devon presumably to live with relatives. In 1808 he was articled to a wood engraver in Leadenhall Street, City of London, for seven years. He married the niece of his employer, Robinianna Bonner (1792-1881), on 27 June 1815 at St. Mary’s, Islington. They had at least eight children. Poetical Essays (1822), with eleven engravings by him, also contains poems addressed to Robinianna and her sister, Mary Ann Bonner. In 1826 he was elected a member of the Royal Incorporated Artists Annuity Fund and in Sept. 1827 became a member of the management committee of the London Mechanics’ Institution, founded by George Birkbeck in 1823. He delivered lectures on wood engraving at the Royal Institution, the London Literary Institution, and the London Mechanics’ Institution. Possibly hoping to develop wood engraving in America, in Nov. 1829 he sailed for New York, where he opened a bookshop in Canal Street, Brooklyn, in 1833. Unable to make a sufficient living to support his large family, he returned to England in 1839 and took up lecturing again. Three of his sons who had also trained as wood engravers went out to Australia in the early 1850s. In 1851 he and his wife were living alone at Liverpool Street, St. Pancras, and in Nov. 1856 they joined their sons in Sydney. He gave a well-attended lecture on Shakespeare at Sydney’s School of the Arts but his lectures on “The History and Practice of Wood Engraving” attracted little interest. He had left England in poor health, possibly consumptive, and after developing bronchitis he died on 18 Aug. 1858 at Castlereagh Street, Sydney, and was buried at the Camperdown Cemetery the following day. Robinianna died, aged 89, on 11 June 1881 at the house of their son, George Birkbeck Mason. (ancestry.co.uk 12 Feb. 2023; Examiner 28 June 1829; Bell’s Weekly Messenger 9 Aug. 1840; Sydney Morning Herald 23 Aug. 1858, 13 June 1881; R. K. Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers [1985]) AA
Other Names:
- A. J. Mason