Author: Pottinger, Israel
Biography:
POTTINGER, Israel (1735-82: ancestry.com)
He was the son of John Pottinger and Martha (Hawkins) Pottinger, dissenters, and was baptised in the Lower Meeting House (Independent) at Newbury, Berkshire, on 10 June 1735. He served an apprenticeship to the London bookseller John Worrall and may have been just out of his indentures when he married Ann Wicks at St. Andrew by the Wardrobe on 26 June 1756. They had at least seven children, at least three of whom grew to maturity. He established himself as a bookseller at the sign of the Royal Bible in Ave Maria Lane, near Paternoster Row, where he published a number of short-lived periodicals and some of his own compositions, most of which were satirical or polemical and in some cases scurrilous. For a time he also ran a circulating library in Holborn. Pottinger traded on the names of popular writers for the stage, notably Samuel Foote and R. B. Sheridan (q.v.), by claiming to be following in their footsteps when in fact he was parodying or travestying their work. He appears to have avoided bankruptcy in the early 1760s by paying occasional dividends to his creditors. In 1767 he was confined to Bethlehem Hospital for insanity but his wife managed to have him discharged after two months. His wife Ann died in 1781 and was buried on 7 Apr. in the non-conformist burial ground of Spa Fields, St. James’s, Clerkenwell, where Israel followed on 28 Mar. 1782. (ancestry.com 4 Nov. 2023; findmypast.com 4 Nov. 2023; Baker 3: 40-1; “Israel Pottinger” berkshirehistory.com)