Author: Michell, Nicholas
Biography:
MICHELL, Nicholas (1807-80: ODNB)
He was born on 4 June 1807, at Calenick, near Truro, Cornwall, and baptised on 29 Jan. 1808, the fourth of five children of John Michell (1774-1868), chemist and tin smelter, and his wife Elizabeth Hingeston (1771-1855), who had married in 1802. He attended Truro Grammar School and then worked for his father in Calenick and London. He married Maria Waterhouse on 22 June 1836 at St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London. They had two sons, both of whom died in infancy. He contributed to the Annuals and published the volumes of verse listed here in the 1830s. Living Poets and Poetesses (1832), a satire on his contemporaries, is still worth reading. In London, he met Thomas Campbell, Dickens, Thackeray, and other literary celebrities. His later volumes of poetry, Ruins of Many Lands (1849), Spirits of the Past (1853), The Poetry of Creation (1856), Pleasure (1859), and The Immortals, or, Glimpses of Paradise (1870), failed to establish him as a poet but had a small circle of admirers. His historical novels, The Fatalist; or, The Fortunes of Godolphin (1840), The Traduced (1842), and The Eventful Epoch; or, the Fortunes of Archer Clive (1846) also had their admirers but have failed to enter the canon of the Victorian novel. His collection of vignettes, London in Light and Darkness (1871) is still worth reading for its descriptions of splendour and squalor, and contained his collected minor poems together with some previously unpublished. He added further poems in his last work, Nature and Life (1878), published in the Lansdowne Poets series. He died on 6 Apr. 1880 at his residence at Tehidy Terrace, Falmouth, Cornwall. (ODNB 21 Sept. 2022; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis [1874], 1: 352-4; West Country Poets, 330-3; Boyle 189-90; Western Times 3 Sept. 1836; Cornish Echo 10 and 17 Apr. 1880; Western Morning News 11 June 1887) AA