Author: Reade, John Edmund
Biography:
READE, John Edmund (1800-1870: ODNB)
“Never was a poet so hot for celebrity” (Walter Savage Landor). The scion of a Roman Catholic family, he was the only boy among the four children of Thomas Reade (1762-1837) of Barton Manor, Berks, and his wife, Catherine (Hill) Reade (d 1830). He was born Oct. 1800 at Broadwell, Gloucestershire. The only formal education he received was at a school at Doulting Sheepslate, near Shepton Mallet. On 1 Oct 1846 at East Budleigh, Devon, he married his sixteen-year-old cousin (his junior by thirty years), Maria Louisa (1831-1886), the elder daughter of George Compton Reade (1788-1866). They had a single child, Agnes Coralie (b 1858). He died at Eden Villa, Budleigh Salterton, Devon, on 17 Sept. 1870. At probate, his estate was valued under £2,000. A striving poet and novelist and an inveterate plagiarist, in the world of letters he was an object of sometimes malicious fun. Landor, who delighted in ridiculing him, described him as “an elongated, moth-eaten-looking individual” and, in a review in Blackwood’s, as an author “of so little modesty—so little sense of shame—so little self-knowledge.” His poems however were sufficiently popular that Longmans published a collected edition in 1865. (ODNB 31 Dec. 2023; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 52 [July 1842], 119; C. Reade, A Record of the Redes of Barton Court, Berks. [1899], 57; R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography [1954], 299) JC
Other Names:
- Edmund I. Reade