Author: Pepper, Henry
Biography:
PEPPER, Henry (1739-1808: ancestry.com)
Henry Pepper published only one book, this one; it reveals very little about him but it shows signs of a literary education (epigraphs in French and Latin) and is dedicated to Henry Mac-Neale (or Macneale) Kennedy, an Irish doctor who graduated from Leyden in 1775. The only likely candidate is Henry Pepper, born Johan Heinrich Pfeffer in Strasburg, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 and built up a successful brewing business which was carried on by his sons after his death. He was married to Catherine Mogk; they had two sons and a daughter. Presumably he met Kennedy in Germany or the Netherlands; there is internal evidence of exchanges of poems by correspondence. There remain the mysteries of why Pepper wrote in English if the poems were, as the preliminary Advertisement describes them, the products of "leisure in early youth," and why he waited so long to publish them. Several of the poems are addressed as epistles to Kennedy, who evidently shared Pepper's taste for the poetry of Pope, Swift, and Young to which the verses allude; as he approached sixty, Pepper seems to have been revisiting a friendship of his twenties. (ancestry.com 18 June 2020; E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen [2011])