Author: Robinson, Thomas
Biography:
ROBINSON, Thomas (1768/9-1821: ancestry.com)
Thomas Robinson was baptized 10 Sept. 1769 at Bigby, Lincolnshire, the eldest of two children, both sons, of Thomas Robinson and his wife, Susannah Wright. At age 27, he married Mary Ann Scrivner, his junior by two years, on 22 June 1796 at St Mary’s, Hull, Yorkshire. Performed at Louth, Lincolnshire on 21 Dec. 1798, his True Patriotism, or Poverty Ennobled by Virtue was published in 1799. Some authorities ascribe True Patriotism to George Holford (q.v.). As demonstrated in a 1799 letter from “Curioso” in Gentleman’s Magazine and in Robinson’s 1816 correspondence with the RLF, the play is, however, Robinson’s alone. His major work, The Tyrolese Villagers … with Other Poems (1810), a writer in the British Critic thought “indicative of taste, and an elegant mind.” In a searing and unwarrantedly lengthy review, the MR’s critic, however, called it “barbarous nonsense” and “trash.” Probably as a consequence, his advertised book, “Social Amusements Vindicated; a Didactic Poem, In Two Parts,” did not appear. Following fifteen years as a school teacher at Seaford and in London, illness in his family “impelled him to quit his profession.” Repeated illness disrupted his employment as secretary to “respectable gentlemen,” including to a captain at the Navy Office, and, towards the end of his life, employment as a bill collector. Driven to destitution, his family were helped by a Church of England organization, the Spitalfields Benevolent Society, and by a Bank of England official, John Kinder Tatham. Supported by a letter from Capel Lofft (q.v.) in 1816, and by an 1819 letter from George Butler, a senior clerk of the Ordnance, he successfully turned to the RLF. In Mar. 1819, the Fund voted him £10. Following appeals from his son Thomas—the poet now having been deprived of his reason—it repeated that amount in 1820 and in 1821. He died at age 52 in Lloyd’s Row, Finsbury, on 16 July 1821, and was buried the next day at St James's, Clerkenwell. The RLF voted his widow £10. (ancestry.com 27 Mar. 2024; RLF file 353; MR 67 [1812], 186-89; British Critic 38 [1812], 532-33; Baker, 3: 356; Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry [1814], 562-63; J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration [1832], 10: 214) HJ
Other Names:
- T. Robinson