Author: Nichols, John
Biography:
NICHOLS, John (1745-1826: ODNB) pseudonym The Cobbler of Alsatia
He was born in Islington on 2 Feb. 1745, the son of Edward Nichols (1719-79) and his wife Anne Wilmot (1719-83). Educated at John Shield’s Academy, Islington, Nichols was apprenticed to the printer William Bowyer (1699-1777) in 1759 and was soon writing poems, acrostics, and rebuses for newspapers. Among his early separate publications in verse were The Buds of Parnassus. A Collection of Original Poems (anon., 1762, repr. 1764); Islington. A Poem Addressed to Mr Benjamin Stapp (1763); and contributions to William Perfect, The Laurel Wreath, being a collection of Original Miscellaneous Poems, on Subjects Moral, Comic and Divine (1765) and the anonymous Amours of Lais; or the Misfortunes of Love (1766). Nichols inherited Bowyer’s business on 18 Nov. 1777 and was immediately engaged to print the Prefaces to Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In July 1778 he joined David Henry (1710-92) in printing and editing the Gentleman’s Magazine, which he used, through his many pseudonymous contributions, to promote Johnson’s work and ensure that he himself was credited for the biographical anecdotes he had been able to provide from Bowyer’s printing records. As a supplement to Johnson’s Lives, Nichols compiled his Select Collection of Miscellaneous Poems (1780-82), including ten of his own poems in this anthology. Nichols’s Anecdotes, Biographical and Literary, of the Late Mr William Bowyer, Printer (1778) grew into the Literary Anecdotes (9 vols., 1812-15) and Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (8 vols., 1817-58). Completed by his son John Bowyer Nichols (1779-1863), they provide an encyclopaedic overview of the literary culture of the long-eighteenth century. The poems Nichols wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine until 1824 were included in his Birth-Day Odes and other Domestic Poems (1827). Nichols married Anne Cradock (1737-76) on 22 Jun. 1766 with whom he had three children. Only two, Anne (1768-1815) and Sarah (1771-1843), survived infancy. On 11 Jun. 1778 he married Martha Green (1756-88). Of their seven children, only five lived to maturity. Nichols lived in Whitefriars 1759-67, Red Lion Passage, Fleet Street, 1767-1803, and Highbury Place, Islington, 1803 to his death on 26 Nov. 1826. (ODNB for Nichols family 20 Feb. 2022; Manuscript copies of Nichols’s poems are held by the Bodleian Library MS. Eng. b. 2071 ff. 12-13; Columbia University, New York, Spec. Coll. Nichols and in Private Collections) JP