Author: Reed, William
Biography:
REED, William (1770-1813: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 12 Sept. 1770 and baptised on 14 Oct. at Thornbury, Gloucestershire, the son of William Reed, cordwainer and shopkeeper, and his wife Anne Price, who had married in 1762. He gave a brief account of his mother’s Welsh family in 1798 (Remains, 69-70) and his baptism records her as the daughter of Phillip and Eleanor Price. He received a limited local education in reading, writing, and arithmetic but also learned to draw and to play the flute. At sixteen he was placed in a shop to learn the trade of shoemaker but disliked it. In 1790 he was moved to convert after hearing a Baptist woman recite a prayer. He also developed a taste for nature and writing poetry. He left Thornbury in 1791 for a six-month tour of the north as a journeyman shoemaker and visited Worcester, Gloucester, and Birmingham. In 1796 he was offered a servant’s position with a student at Edinburgh and whilst there made two excursions and was struck by the sublime scenery of the Scottish mountains. He returned to Thornbury after a year and fell in love with a thirty-year old Baptist woman, but her father’s disapproval and her acquiescence in it thwarted his hopes of marriage, which ended finally with her death in 1799. His father died the same year and left him property (which he had acquired through marriage) and thereafter Reed lived an unsettled but comfortable existence. Always keener on excursions than his trade, he planned to go to Canada in 1807 and to Madeira and the West Indies in 1812, but nothing came of these projects. He toured Wales in 1798 and Ireland in 1810: “Rambles in Ireland,” “The Welsh Estate,” (Remains, 3-53, 73-115). He spent over a year in Bristol 1811-12 and then went to Guernsey. Remains (1815) also contains his letters and poems with perhaps the most notable being “Ode to the Memory of Mary Wollstonecraft” (131-2). He died on 30 Sept. 1813 in Guernsey and was buried there in the Friends’ burial ground, leaving £1000 of bank stock and naval annuities to his siblings, Daniel and Ann, and an aunt. (John Evans, “Memoir,” Remains of William Reed [1815], ix-lvii; ancestry.co.uk 4 Oct. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 4 Oct. 2022) AA