Author: Rogers, John Benjamin
Biography:
ROGERS, John Benjamin (b 1786: ancestry.com)
The barest information is recorded for the author of the unadvertised poem The Days of Harold. A Metrical Tale, published at the Minerva Press in 1816. He was born at Rotherhithe, in South London, on 27 Mar. 1786 the son of John Rogers and his wife, Elizabeth, residents of the parish of St Paul, Shadwell. His baptism took place in London on 3 June 1791 at the Independent chapel in Jamaica Row, Bermondsey. The poet had a brother, Frederick Henry (b 1788), and two sisters, Jemma (b 1789) and Mary Eliza (b 1791). On 7 May 1806, he married Margaret Hart at St George in the East, Cannon Street Road. There was a single child by the marriage, Frederick Houstown Rogers, baptized 16 July 1828, at St Leonard, Shoreditch. In the register of his son’s birth, the poet’s profession is identified as “clerk” and his address as “Clifton Street.” He might be the schoolmaster of that name who in 1833 petitioned the crown for exemption from the House and Window Tax. There is no known record of his death. The only critical notice of his The Days of Harold, in the May 1816 European Magazine and London Review, was laudatory. His reviewer praised his “exuberant fancy and cultivated taste” and his considerable “share of versifying talent.” (ancestry.com 15 May 2024; Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons [1833], 784) JC