Author: Palmer, John
Biography:
PALMER, John (c. 1741-1818: findmypast.com)
John Palmer--until 1797 John Palmer Jun.--was primarily a writer of Gothic novels with the Minerva Press and others: The Haunted Cavern (1796), The Mystery of the Black Tower (1796), The World as It Goes (1803), and The Mystic Sepulchre (1806). The two poems listed have not been seen, and no extant copies have been found. He is most probably the John Palmer who was the elder of two sons of John Palmer (d 1797) with his first wife, Elizabeth, baptised in Bristol on 23 Feb. 1742. She died before 1767 at which point Palmer Sen. married three-times-widowed Rosa (Kelly) Fanning Ash Witter, whose first husband had left her the Rose Hall estate in Jamaica. He went on to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas at St. James, Jamaica. After the death of his second wife in 1790, he married Rebecca Ann James of Trelawny, Jamaica, in 1792. On his death in 1797 his estates of Rose Hall and Palmyra, with their enslaved people, were held in trust for his English sons and their heirs; after James died in Bristol in 1806, John became the sole inheritor, but since both brothers died childless the estates passed to a distant cousin. Rebecca (James) Palmer married Ralph Mountague and moved to Bristol. John Palmer died at his home in the Paragon Buildings, Bath, Somersetshire, on 11 Sept. 1818, unmarried, aged 77, leaving his share in the Paragon Buildings and an annuity of £400 to his “esteemed friend” Elizabeth White of Bristol. The remainder of his Jamaican estates, in particular the Acton estate in Trelawny, went to the Mountague family. Palmer is not to be confused with the more famous John Palmer of Bath (1742-1818), controller of the mailcoaches, who predeceased him by a month. (ancestry.com 10 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 10 Aug. 2023; LBS 10 Aug. 2023; EN1, EN2)
Other Names:
- J. Palmer