Author: Parsons, Thomas
Biography:
PARSONS, Thomas (1744-1813: ancestry.com)
No birth or baptismal record has been found (it was not Wellington, Somerset), but since his father Robert Parsons (1718-90) had been a Baptist minister since 1742, that is not surprising. He was probably born in Bristol; his mother was Robert’s first wife, Mary Giles (d 1765) and they had married in Bristol in 1741. Robert Parsons, a stone-mason, established a very successful business in Bath, specializing in ornamental stone-carving. The family home and business were in Claverton St., Bath, but they owned properties also in nearby Wycombe and Lyncombe. Thomas joined his father in the business and in his free time cultivated literary and other intellectual interests: in 1779 he became one of the founders of the Bath Philosophical Society, of which the astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) was a member. It was Thomas Parsons who designed the famous vase belonging to Anna Miller (q.v.) at Batheaston, into which her guests dropped their poems. Despite disagreements with his father over religion, Thomas was eventually baptised about 1770 and served as co-pastor of the Bath Baptist congregation with his father from 1771 (Klein) and as sole pastor for a year following his father’s death in 1790. On 18 Sept. 1770 he married Hannah Frances Best at St. Peter’s, Colchester, Essex; the couple had nine children, only four of whom grew to maturity. His occasional publications include sermons, political pamphlets on social issues, and religious controversy, but also verses such as “Effusions of Paternal Affection on the Death of a Lovely Daughter.” Parsons died in Bath in 1813 and was buried in the Old Baptist burial ground on 24 Sept. 1813. His Familiar Odes contains prefatory material indicating that the author, identified only as “the father of a family,” had prepared the work for the press but died before publication; it is not clear how the publisher in Chipping Norton acquired it so many years after Parsons’s death but he had a brother in Bath to whom the ms might have been entrusted. (ancestry.com 21 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 21 Aug. 2023; Lawrence E. Klein, “An Artisan in Polite Culture: Thomas Parsons, Stone Carver of Bath, 1744-1813,” Huntington Library Quarterly 75:1 [2012], 27-51) HJ