Author: Parker, George
Biography:
PARKER, George (1732-1800: ODNB)
An itinerant actor, lecturer, and entertainer, Parker was the son of a tradesman and was born at Green Street, Kent (now part of Bromley, South London), in 1732. Autobiographical evidence in A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life, being the Adventures of Mr. G. Parker (1781) may not be entirely reliable but provides a general outline of his career. He was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, joined the navy as a midshipman but left to join the army in 1754 and rose to the rank of sergeant while serving for seven years in Portugal, Gibraltar, and Minorca. In 1761 he became an innkeeper at the King’s Head in Canterbury and, when that enterprise failed, took on a London inn, also without success. Turning to the stage, he performed possibly in Norwich and certainly in Ireland and in Scotland. In Edinburgh in Nov. 1771 he married another actor, Miss Heydon, but left her not long after and resumed his peripatetic life. His father supported him for eight months in Paris in 1776 after which time he began giving occasional lectures about his travels. Back in England, he did some acting in London and the provinces and set himself up as a lecturer on elocution. He published by subscription, besides the View of Society and the Humorous Sketches, Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters (1789 and later editions). He was reported to have been reduced to selling gingerbread at fairs in his final years. He died at the poorhouse in Coventry, Warwickshire, and was buried on 2 May 1800. One of the death notices described him as “a strange eccentrick character, well known in the theatrical circles” who was also remembered as the Canterbury innkeeper who had charged the Duke de Nivernais and his party “forty pounds” for a breakfast. (ODNB 18 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 18 Aug. 2023; Highfill; Exeter Flying Post 25 Sept. 1800)