Author: Roberts, William
Biography:
ROBERTS, William (c. 1727-1807: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the eldest son of William Roberts (1702-60), originally from Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, and Margaret Scudamore (1700-75). The place and date of the marriage have yet to be located. Nothing is known of his education; he is said to have been commissioned in the army. He then successfully ran a boarding-school in Wandsworth, south London, and was living in Newington Butts, Lambeth, in the 1760s. He later retired to Stanmore, Middlesex, where his father had acquired property and died in 1760. He died there, aged 80, on 23 Sept. 1807, from concussion following a fall down the cliffs on the Isle of Wight. His wife had died four days earlier. They were both buried at St. John the Evangelist, Stanmore. His wife was Mary Barnes whom he married at Bath Abbey on 7 June 1761. They went on to have at least eight children, some of whom predeceased him. In his will he made special provision for four surviving daughters. His son William Roberts (1767-1849) was later the editor of the British Review and dedicated an early periodical, The Looker-On (1792-3), to him. His sister Radagunda Roberts (q.v.) also wrote verse and drama. Another brother, Richard Roberts (1729-1823), was High Master at St. Paul’s school (1769-1814) and to him Roberts dedicated Thoughts upon Creation (1782). Poetical Attempts (1784) includes “Four Odes to the Seasons”; “Description of the Neighbourhood of Abergavenny”; “An Address to Mr. B-----S, of Tewkesbury, Ironmonger” (Thomas Barnes, his brother-in-law); “A Pindaric Ode”; and concludes with three poems “By A Lady” (unidentified), the most notable of which is “The Storm.” John Watkins erroneously included him in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors(1816), 296. (ancestry.co.uk 26 Dec. 2023, General Evening Post 22 Sept. 1807; MP 29 Sept. 1807; GM Sept. 1807, 895, Oct. 1807, 98; “Roberts, William 1767-1849,” ODNB 26 Dec. 2023; Rivers [1798], 2: 203-4) AA