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Author: Parkin, Miles

Biography:

PARKIN, Miles (1750-88: ancestry.co.uk)

He was baptised on 21 Apr. 1750 at Millom, Cumberland, the son of William Parkin and his wife Susanna Wennington. On his mother’s side he was related to Myles Cooper (1735-85) (q.v.) whose sister had married Susanna’s brother, Rev. Miles Wennington (1726-77). Both men were educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, and Miles Parkin duly matriculated there in 1769 (BA 1773). He then entered the Established Church and became curate of Chinnor and Crowell, and Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire, in 1776. He married Mary Saunders on 26 Jan. 1775 at Aston Rowant, and they went on to have at least six children. Two of them died in infancy and he refers to the death of his eldest son, William, in Columba (1783), his only publication, which, like his uncle’s poems, The Patriots of North-America and "Stanzas . . . by an Exile from America" (GM July 1776, 326-7), deals with the consequences of the American war. At the end of the volume he announced the imminent publication of  Fourteen Satires, In the Manner of Pope and Churchill, but it does not seem to have appeared. He was probably the Rev. Parkins (sic), “late of Queen’s College, Oxford,” who died on 1 Aug. 1788 in great poverty at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, London, leaving a wife and four children. It is not known why his circumstances had deteriorated so dramatically. One death notice added cryptically, “Let ‘stalled theology,’ revellying [sic] in the superabundance of their temporalities, contemplate the above case, and connect it to themselves with the scriptural account of the fates of Dives and Lazarus." (ancestry.co.uk 25 Apr. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 25 Apr. 2021; CCEd 25 Apr. 2021; Stamford Mercury 8 Aug. 1788; GM Aug. 1788, 753) AA

 

Books written (1):