Author: Melmoth, Henry
Biography:
MELMOTH, Henry (fl 1770-1807)
Henry Melmoth is at once a visible and an elusive figure. His only known collection of original poetry, published in 1807, bears this name on the title-page. In a preface he claims that the poems took five years to produce, being composed “in the moments snatched from severer studies.” Several of them have to do with places in Ireland, for instance Killarney and Innisfallen. Despite the author’s calling them “humble efforts,” many of them involve a display of classical learning, Latin and Greek. He was certainly well educated but not a university graduate. The name “Henry Melmoth” appears also in the subscription list for a British Family Bible (1800): this source identifies him as the editor of the quarto editions of Homer, Virgil, etc. That means that Melmoth went by “William Henry Melmoth, Esq.” in his professional career as a literary editor for the Paternoster-Row bookseller Alex Hogg, for whom he translated the Telemachus of Fenelon (q.v.) and prepared for publication the “whole works” of Homer (1780, mostly Pope) and Virgil (1786), besides an anthology of stories under variants of the title Modern Universal Story-Teller (1780), an abridged Grecian History (1781), and a matching Roman History (c. 1780). These titles were widely advertised by the publisher. According to one report Melmoth published a novel in 2 vols. in 1785, The Lake of Killarney, but no extant copy has been located and there is no record in EN1. (Anna Maria Porter, q.v., used the same title for a novel in 1838.) No reliable public records have been found for him under either name but it seems very likely that he was an Irishman in London earning a decent living by his pen. He might be the William Melmoth who was buried at Shillingstone, Dorset, on 12 June 1822 but more probably he died earlier, in either London or Ireland. (ancestry.com 21 May 2023; findmypast.com 21 May 2023; ESTC)