Author: OWEN, William
Biography:
OWEN, William, later OWEN PUGHE (1759-1835: DWB)
Pseudonym Idrison
The son of John and Anne Owen, he was born on 7 Aug. 1759 at Tyn-y-bryn, Merioneth, Wales. Little is certain about his education but his father is said to have been a singer to the harp and Owen was early influenced by Welsh poetry and singing. In 1776 he moved to London where he worked as a teacher, contributed to periodicals, and met other Welsh scholars including Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr). He became a member of the Welsh Society of Gwyneddigion in 1783 and began working on his Welsh-English dictionary. The first part of the dictionary was issued in 1793 and a two-volume edition was published in 1803. Although Owen’s etymology is acknowledged to be flawed, it was a monumental achievement. He worked with Jones in editing the Welsh verse of a fourteenth-century Welsh bard, published as Barddoniaeth Dafydd Ab Gwilym in 1789. It includes an introduction in English by Owen and some spurious poems which were actually written by Edward Williams (q.v.). Owen married Sarah Elizabeth Harper at St. Marylebone on 9 Aug. 1790; they had one son, Aneurin Owen, and two daughters. Aneurin later became an eminent Welsh historian and one of the daughters, Ellen, married the son of Richard Fenton (q.v.). Owen’s Heroic Elegies and other Pieces of Llywarc Hen was published in 1792. (Llywarc Hen was a sixth-century British prince who is the hero of Welsh tales which probably date from the ninth century.) Owen worked with Jones, Fenton, and Williams on The Myvyrian Archaiology [sic] of Wales (1801, 1807) and edited the Cambrian Register (1795, 1799, 1818). In about 1803 he became a follower of Joanna Southcott (q.v.). Owen inherited property from a distant relation, the Rev. Rice Pughe of Nantglyn in Denbighshire, Wales, in 1806. He assumed the name Pughe and moved to Nantglyn where he spent much of the rest of his life, publishing translations from English into Welsh. He died of a stroke on 3 June 1835 in Merioneth where he had gone for the sake of his health. Owen was a member of the Society of Antiquaries and in 1822 Oxford University awarded him an honorary DCL. (DWB 3 Jan. 2025; ODNB 3 Jan. 2025; ancestry.co.uk 3 Jan. 2025) SR