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Author: Roberts, William Isaac

Biography:

ROBERTS, William Isaac (1786-1806: Poems and Letters)

He was born at Bristol on 5 May 1786 and baptised 24 Jan. 1787 at St. Michael the Archangel, Bristol,  the third child and only son of William Roberts and Ann[e] Pigg, who had married in 1778. He was educated at an academy in Kingsdown Parade where he received a commercial education but developed an early passion for poetry and drawing. By the age of fourteen he was producing versions of the Psalms, versifications of Ossian, and original pieces. On leaving school, he entered a bank as a clerk but found it difficult to reconcile commercial and creative life: "We cannot serve God and Mammon. I have trembled and wept for the sacrifice” (x). He came to the attention of Charles Fox (1749-1809), an admired Persian scholar, who encouraged his efforts and helped him acquire some knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. His sister Anna Catherine (1780-1798) died of consumption; he also showed early signs of consumption and by February 1806 he probably knew his fate. He died on 26 Dec. 1806 at St. Augustine’s Place, Bristol, leaving a small estate to his sister Eliza and his mother Ann, and his poetical remains to his friends Edward Hogg and Paul Moon James (q.v.), who edited them and prefixed two tributary poems signed H. and J. Southey (q.v.) was supportive of the project, solicited subscriptions, and would later include Roberts in Sketches of Obscure Poets (1833). He was also included in John Styles’s anthology of young dead poets, Early Blossoms (1819). The 1811 volume included an important and long-neglected tribute to Chatterton, "Chatterton, or the Minstrelle. A Fragment"; two poems widely admired at the time, "The Terrors of Imagination" and "The Voice of Nature"; and accomplished topographical and anti-slavery poems. (Roberts,Poems and Letters [1811]; ancestry.co.uk 31 May 2021; Romantic Circles: Robert Southey Correspondence, Letter to Neville White 11 Mar. 1810; Gloucester Journal 12 Jan. 1807) AA

 

Books written (1):

London/ Birmingham: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown/ printed by Knott and Lloyd, 1811