Author: Pigott, John Dryden
Biography:
PIGOTT, John Dryden, later CORBET (1808-89: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 18 Apr. 1808 at Newport Chetwynd, Shropshire, the eldest son and one of thirteen children of Rev. John Dryden Pigott (1778-1845), Rector of Edgmond and Habberley, Shropshire, and his wife Frances Bevan (1786-1860), who had married at Shrewsbury in 1806. It is not known where he went to school (he is not in the Shrewsbury registers) but he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford (matric. 1826, BA 1830). He succeeded to the Rectorship of Edgmond in 1845 on the death of his father and remained there for twenty years. On the death of Annabella, Lady Brinckman, he succeeded to the Sundorne Castle Estate in 1864 and in 1865 assumed the title of Corbet by royal licence, whereupon he gave up the rectory at Edgmond and became clergy without cure of souls. He published Collected Poems (2 vols. 1877) which collected his earlier volumes, Johannice(1832), The Patriarch of the Nile (1852), Egypt (1853), Lay of the Crimea (1855-6), and his uncollected and minor poems. The Westminster Review called it 500 pages of doggerel (he had sent them only the first volume). He died at Sundorne Castle, aged 81, on 25 Oct. 1889, leaving an estate of £21,285 with his youngest brother, Rev. George William Pigott, as executor. He never married.(ancestry.co.uk 13 Nov. 2022; CCEd 13 Nov. 2022; Morning Post 29 Oct. 1889; Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry [1871], 1: 281; Westminster Review 52 [1877], 277-78) AA