Author: Sadler, Thomas
Biography:
SADLER, Thomas (b 1730? d 1773: findmypast.com)
Probably he is the Thomas Sadler baptized at Marbury on 16 July 1730, the son of Ambrose Sadler (1706-1763) of Wirswall, Shropshire, and his wife, Martha Hughes (married 5 Nov. 1729 at Marbury, Cheshire). Sadler wrote that Ambrose’s family once were “in a fluent State / But now reduc’d to lower Class by Fate.” His earliest known residence was Newhall, Cheshire. From there he moved to Nantwich, then to Wrenbury, and finally to Whitchurch in Shropshire (three miles from Wirswall) where he lived permanently from about 1758. He died at Whitchurch and was buried there on 27 Nov. 1773. On 26 July 1752 at Stoke-upon-Turn he married Margaret Fisher. They had two sons, Ambrose (d 1831), baptized in Feb 1756 at Marbury, and Zebediah (d 1838), baptized at Whitchurch in Sep. 1758. From about Mar. 1769, he taught writing, mathematics, and surveying at his Whitchurch school. He also designed buildings, surveyed estates, measured “Marl-pits,” and contracted for “all Kinds of Artificers Work.” Inspired by working-class poets James Woodhouse (q.v.) and Stephen Duck, in 1766 he published Poems on Various Subjects (the book includes a play, “The Merry Miller,” that a CR reviewer called “poor and insipid”), and, in 1768, Miscellaneous Poems. A passionate composer and solver of “ænigmas, rebuses, paradoxes,” in a long-running dialogue with other brainy men and women, he published these “mental recreations” in mathematical “diaries,” the Ladies’ Diary, Gentleman’s Diary, Gentleman’s and Ladies’ Diary, Charles Hutton’s Diarian Miscellany, and in other periodicals, Hutton’s Miscellanea Mathematica, the Universal Magazine, Universal Museum, British Palladium, Town and Country, and London Magazine. In 1771 he commenced his own journal, The Muses Cabinet, or Delights for the Ingenious. He intended to issue it semi-annually, but he died before a second number could appear. Also in 1771, he published A Complete System of Practical Arithmetic (more than 800 subscribers), in which, to keep the attention of “both sexes,” he posed questions and examples in verse. Hoping perhaps to emulate Woodhouse, he attempted to attract the patronage of grandees: Clive of India, Sir Lynch Salusbury Cotton, Lord Grosvenor, and Sir Richard Hill of Hawkstone. He succeeded only to the extent that members of their families subscribed to his poems. (findmypast.com 21 June 2023; British Palladium [1769]; Shrewsbury Chronicle 26 Dec. 1772, 2 Jan. 1773, 16 Jan. 1773; British Palladium, Annual Miscellany [1775]) JC