Author: Roscoe, Robert
Biography:
ROSCOE, Robert (1789-1850: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the fourth son of William Roscoe (q.v.) and his wife Jane Griffies; two of his sisters and two brothers were also poets. (See Jane Elizabeth Roscoe, Mary Anne Jevons, Thomas Roscoe, and William Stanley Roscoe.) No records have been located for his birth or baptism but death notices gave his age as 61 in 1850, giving a birth year of 1789. Nothing is known about his early education but in Apr. 1805 at the age of fifteen he became clerk to John Fritchett (q.v.), an attorney whose multi-volume King Alfred he later completed and had printed. He matriculated at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, at Easter 1811 and was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 26 Nov. of the same year. On 1 May 1819 he married Martha Walker in London; they had seven daughters and three surviving sons. He joined the Inner Temple and worked as a lawyer in London where the family lived at 14 Torrington Park, Finchley, but he retired early because of ill-health. He died at Englefield Green, Surrey, on 1 Dec. 1850 and was buried at Kensal Green. His will, dated 5 Nov. 1845 and proved on 21 Jan. 1851, left his estate to his wife as long as she should remain his widow. At least one of his sonnets is included in the family collection, Poems for Youth. (ancestry.co.uk 6 Sept. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 14 Nov. 2025; National Archives UK PROB 11/2126/113; ACAD 14 Nov. 2025; Athenaeum 14 Dec. 1850; The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn 2 [1896] 45; Liverpool Mail 7 Dec. 1850) SR