Author: Noyes, Robert
Biography:
NOYES, Robert (1778-1851: ancestry.com)
Raised in the Dissenting family of Rev. Robert Noyes (1730-98), q.v., and his wife Hannah Lade, he was the youngest of nine children and was born in Cranbrook, Kent, in 1778. Nothing is known of his education or early career but he ended his life in Liverpool, where he had been employed as a bookkeeper. He might have lived as a young man in London, where he published his elegy for Princess Charlotte in 1817. (An earlier elegy by him on the death of William Jackson was included in a list of new publications in 1810, but no copy has been located.) On 9 Sept. 1826 he married Elizabeth (“Betsey”) Smith at her parish of St. Anne’s, Liverpool, Lancashire, and they had eight children, six of whom were still living with them at the time of the 1851 Census, the three eldest boys working as a bookkeeper, a bookseller, and an apprentice to a pawnbroker, respectively. Noyes died on 11 July 1851 and was buried in the Merseyside Necropolis on 17 July. It is not clear where or when his widow died. Although they named their youngest “Alfred,” there seems to be no direct connection between that family and the Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) who wrote “The Highwayman.” (ancestry.com 6 Mar. 2024; findmypast.com 6 Mar. 2024; CR Sept. 1810, 112) HJ