Author: Sadler, Robert
Biography:
SADLER, Robert (1752-1839: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 1 Dec. 1752 at Christ Church, Swindon, Wiltshire, the son of Robert Sadler, a Moravian glover and breeches-maker, and his wife Ann Lawrence, who had married the previous year in the same church. Nothing is known of his education and he appears to have been self-educated. He married Sarah Lewis on 7 Jan. 1774 at Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and they moved to Chippenham about ten miles away. She died there and was buried at St. Andrew’s on 27 Dec. 1776. He then married Anna Hancock on 5 Jul. 1778 at Chippenham. It is not known if there was issue from either marriage. He worked as a draper and kept a shop without enthusiasm; his friend and the principal source for his life, the antiquarian John Britton, found him an “abstracted and melancholy, but highly intellectual man,” who seemed to suffer from bad nerves and was probably consumptive. He died on 23 Aug. 1839 and was buried at St. Andrew, Chippenham. Anna Sadler had predeceased him a few months earlier. He left his estate valued at over £4000 intestate and Britton thought it consumed in Chancery. His literary manuscripts passed to his nephew, James Lewis of Malmesbury, and included two novels, The Pupil of Experience and The Proselyte of Principle. Their whereabouts is unknown. He was well known in his lifetime for the novel Wanley Penson; or, the Melancholy Man (1791), a curious sentimental Moravian bildungsroman. In addition to the works listed here, he published a short eulogy of Sir James Tylney Long MP, True Patriotism: An Apostrophe (1795). Britton cites another poem, An Elegy on the Death of an Esteemed Friend, Wm. Colbourne, Esq. (np nd) but no copy has been located. (John Britton, Auto-Biography [1850], 338-44; ancestry.co.uk 16 Jun. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 16 Jun. 2022; Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette 6 Apr. 1839, 29 Aug. 1839) AA
Other Names:
- R. Sadler