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Author: Meilan, Mark Anthony

Biography:

MEILAN, Mark Anthony (1743-1813: ODNB)

He was born on 25 Aug. 1743 and baptised on 18 Sept. at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, London, the son of Abraham Meilan and his wife Elizabeth South, who had married without banns (a Fleet or clandestine marriage) at St. Dunstan’s in the East on 1 May 1733. His father’s family was possibly French or Swiss Protestant. Nothing is known of his education. He was ordained deacon (1778) and priest (1779) and became curate of Ilford Parva, Essex, in 1779. He was later at St. John’s, Wapping, London, and from around 1803 at St. Mary’s, Newington. His first work, Stenography, or Short-Hand Improved (1764), written while he was a clerk in the Secretary’s Office of the Postal Service, used a simplified alphabet and was considered by some people an improvement on existing textbooks. He attempted to establish himself with little success as a verse dramatist in the early 1770s with the works listed here. By 1776 he was running an academy, probably teaching English grammar and foreign languages, in Charles Square, Hoxton, London, from where he wrote his verse adaptation of Fenelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, An Epic Poem. In the 1780s he produced a translation of Arnaud Berquin’s multi-volume instructional books for children: The Children’s Friend (24 vols. 1786). His Sermons for Children (1789) consisted of discourses on fifty-two subjects, each ending with a hymn. In another work of religion instruction, Holy Writ Familiarized to Juvenile Conceptions (1791), he described himself as an “indefatigable Labourer in the Vineyard of Instruction” (1: 1). A final work, An Introduction to the English Language (1803), included an appendix of five hundred grammatical errors by “our Best Writers.” He married Elizabeth Newton on 4 Oct. 1768 at St. Dunstan-in-the-West, City of London. They had at least two sons and two daughters. He died at Kennington Lane, Lambeth, South London, and was buried on 30 July 1813 at St. Mary’s, Newington, aged 70. His will left some provision for his two unmarried daughters, Maria and Elizabeth. (ODNB 20 Feb. 2023; DNB; CCEd 20 Feb. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 20 Feb. 2023; Watkins, 231; Biographia Dramatica [1812] passim) AA

 

Books written (5):

London: private: "for the Author", [1771]
London: [no publisher: printed "for the Author" by Cox], [1771?]
London: private: "for the Author", [1771]
London: [no publisher: "for the Translator"; sold by Almon and others], 1776