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Author: Newby, Peter

Biography:

NEWBY, Peter (1745-1827: ODNB)

Newby was born in 1745 at a farmhouse manor called Horncop Hall, near Kendal, Westmorland, one of the three children of William Newby and his wife, Elizabeth Carter. Both his parents appear to have died in 1772, yet Newby, in poems written in 1786 and 1789, describes having lived as an orphan “long under [the] most hospitable roof” of his uncle John Carter, who “first … rear’d [him] with a parent’s care.”  He traced his later impoverishment to a legal dispute that robbed him of his inheritance. He followed his older cousin John Carter (1736-1814) to a school at Fernyhalgh run by a convert to Catholicism, Dame Alice Harrison, and to the English College in Douai, Flanders, where both boys prepared for the priesthood. John was ordained (1762); Peter was not, which disappointed his extended family. Following his graduation in 1764, he spent two years as a sailor aboard a slave-trading ship. In Oct. 1766, he began to teach French at the Woolton academy of the Rev. Bartholomew Booth (1732-1785). On 15 May 1768 at Childwall, he married Elizabeth Grant (or Gant) (d 1782) of Prescot. She had been a domestic servant in the household of a Catholic recusant, Lady Molyneux (d 1766) of Woolton Hall. He and Elizabeth had at least four children, Thomas (b 1769), William (b/d 1776), Joseph (b 1777) and Maria (b 1782). When Booth’s school closed, in 1773, he opened his own, illegal, Catholic seminary at Burton, in Kendal. He moved the seminary to Great Eccleston in 1775 and then to Gerard Hall, Haighton in 1780. When the school failed, in 1797, he opened a Catholic bookstore and printing shop; it too was unsuccessful. The poem The Wrongs of Almoona was first identified as Newby’s in 1821, by Peter Armstrong Whittle (pseud. “Marmaduke Tulket”). Newby died in Hill Street, Friargate, Preston, on 16 Dec 1827. His grave is in the St Wilfrid’s Street Catholic cemetery. (ODNB 12 Apr. 2023; ancestry.com 12 Apr. 2023; Lancashire Archives, William Newby, administration bond, 1772: R502/120M; M. Tulket, A Topographical … Account of the Borough of Preston [1821], 266; P. Whittle, History of the Borough of Preston [1837], 2:264-68; J. Gillow, ed., A Literary and Biographical History, or Biographical Dictionary, of the English Catholics [1887-1902], 4:163-64; J. Malone, Peter Newby: Friend to All Mankind [1964]; M. Whitehead, Peter Newby: Eighteenth Century Lancashire Recusant Poet [1980]) JC

 

Books written (3):

London: Allen, 1773
Liverpool: [no publisher: printed by Hodgson], [1788]
Liverpool: Printed for the Author by H. Hodgson and W. Nevett & Son, 1790