Author: Rhodes, George Ambrose
Biography:
RHODES, George Ambrose (1775-1842: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 6 Jan. 1775, one of fourteen children and the eldest surviving son of Rev. George Rhodes, Vicar of Colyton, Devon, and his wife Elizabeth Sleech, who had married in 1773. He was educated at Exeter School, Charterhouse, and King’s School, Rochester. He proceeded to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (matric. 1792, MB 1797, MD 1803, Fellow 1798-1842). He was physician to the Devon and Exeter Hospital from 1804. He died on 21 Sept. 1842 at Bellair House, Heavitree, near Exeter, aged 67, and was buried at St. Michael and All Angels, Heavitree, where there is a memorial wall tablet. He never married and left most of his considerable (inherited) wealth to his siblings. The first edition of Dion (1806) included miscellaneous occasional poetry, the most notable of which was “To Miss Baillie, on reading her Plays on the Passions.” A later edition of Dion (1820) included another play and “Preliminary Remarks [on Modern Poetry]” (1-22), which lamented the decline of modern poetry and the emergence of “demons of false taste.” He planned an extended poem on the subject but it never appeared. He also edited the Shakespeare apocrypha The Fifth of November; or, The Gunpowder Plot (1830). The hitherto unattributed Modern Methodism Unmasked (1829, 2nd enlarged edition) was advertised as his in various London newspapers. (ancestry.co.uk 19 May 2022; findmypast.co.uk 19 May 2022; CCEd 19 May 2022; James Davidson, The History of Newenham Abbey [1853: family tree]; LES 26 Sept. 1842; GM Nov. 1842, 554; London Courier 2 Sept. 1830) AA
Other Names:
- G. A. Rhodes