Author: PRICE, Robert Holland
Biography:
PRICE, Robert Holland (1779-1808?: ancestry.com)
No birth or death record has been found with his full name as it is given on the title-page, but there are many for “Robert Price.” He was probably the son of Robert and Jane Price baptised at Llangollen, Denbighshire, Wales, on 15 Jan. 1779. No extant copy of the first edition of The Horrors of Invasion has been located, but a prefatory note in the second expresses the author’s pleasure at its “favorable reception.” The work is dedicated to the “ladies of Llangollen,” Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who had broken with their relatives in Ireland to live a quiet life of retirement together and who, without achieving literary or artistic distinction themselves, attracted the admiring attention of well known cultural figures such as Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, and Hester Piozzi (qq.v.), and even of royalty. Price identifies himself as a “gentleman” also of Llangollen and pays tribute both to the Ladies and to the place in the text of his poem. An Advertisement in the second edition announces Price’s intention of compiling a “Genealogical and Biographical Account of the Gentry of Wales”: he seeks encouragement and historical documents from readers. No such work appeared, perhaps because he died young, if he was the Robert Price buried at Llangollen on 12 Dec. 1808. (ancestry.com 11 Nov. 2023; findmypast.com 11 Nov. 2023; “Butler, Lady [Charlotte] Eleanor,” ODNB 11 Nov. 2023; Elizabeth Edwards, English-Language Poetry from Wales, 1789-1806 [2013], 301) HJ