Author: Roberts, Samuel
Biography:
ROBERTS, Samuel (1763-1848: ODNB)
Roberts’s own candid autobiography is a primary source for details about his life and opinions. He was born on 18 Apr. 1763 and baptised at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on 25 May. (An elder brother of the same name baptised a year earlier had died in infancy.) His father Samuel Roberts was a successful cutler and manufacturer of silver and plated goods; he had married Mary Sykes on 9 May 1760 at the same church. Roberts writes sympathetically of his mother’s profound spirituality: she attended Anglican worship faithfully, as he did, but she also occasionally attended Methodist and Quaker services. Roberts left school, which he hated, at fourteen and went into the family business. With George Cadman, a fellow apprentice, he registered a silver mark as plate makers in 1786. The business grew rapidly before and after Cadman’s death in 1823; Roberts was recognized as a leader in the Sheffield silver trade. He married Mary Wright of North Anston in 1794: they had one son and three daughters, one of whom was Mary Roberts (q.v.). On the strength of his business success, Roberts embarked on his vocation as a philanthropist and writer. By his own account he had been a timid boy, but moral outrage turned him into a ferocious opponent of a host of social ills that he attacked in many pamphlets, notably slavery, capital punishment, child labour, government lotteries, and especially the new poor laws. The poems included here were only a small part of his campaign as the “Pauper’s Advocate.” He was a good friend of James Montgomery (q.v.), who printed some of his early work. In 1804 he was made overseer of the poor in Sheffield—the first of many offices of the kind. He led the movement against child chimney sweeps; he was a pillar of the Aged Female Society. He died at his home, Grange Park, Sheffield, on 24 July 1848, and was buried at Anston. A long, appreciative obituary in the Sheffield Independent on the day of his interment hailed him as “a man too extraordinary ever to be forgotten by those who have known him.” (ODNB 23 Aug. 2023; Samuel Roberts, Autobiography and Select Remains [1849]; ancestry.com 23 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 23 Aug. 2023; Sheffield Independent 29 July 1848) HJ