Author: Morris, Henry
Biography:
MORRIS, Henry (fl 1832-35)
Reliable public records are scarce for this author and the best evidence about his life and circumstances is to be found in the two modest volumes of verse that he published in 1832 and 1835, dated in both cases from Ilminster, Somerset. In 1832 he maintains that he is not yet 20; he describes his education as “religious”; and the contents are conventionally about “Disappointed Love” and the significant deaths of friends or mentors. A review in The New Casket advised the young author, in the absence of a classical education, to publish by subscription another time so as to avoid some of the errors he had committed in his verse. The second collection reveals that he had been to some extent distracted by “the bustle of a school-room.” It appears that his first employment may have been as a schoolmaster. He seems not to have published again. No convincing record of death has been discovered. He was probably Henry Morris, born in Ilminster on 19 June 1813 and baptised as a Wesleyan non-conformist on 29 Mar., son of a weaver, Henry Morris, and his wife Mary Lock, who had married at Ilminster on 7 Nov. 1805. He might be the Henry Morris, draper and widower, who married Charlotte Phelps, the daughter of a cordwainer, in an Anglican ceremony at Ilminster on 17 May 1853. (No earlier marriage has been confirmed.) The men of this name and age living in Somerset or Dorset at the time of the census in 1841 and 1851 appear all to have been agricultural labourers. (ancestry.com 20 Feb. 2024; findmypast.com 20 Feb. 2024; The New Casket [1834], 61) HJ