Author: Sanderson, Thomas
Biography:
SANDERSON, Thomas (1759-1829: ODNB)
He was born at Currigg, Cumberland, and baptised at Castle Sowerby on 25 Aug. 1759, one of eight children of Sarah (Scott) and John Sanderson, who though not well off managed to give their seven sons good educations: at least two became clergymen. Thomas became a schoolteacher and sometime tutor, and began contributing poems and essays to newspapers and magazines. He never married. In 1791, after his parents had both died, while teaching at Beaumont near Carlisle, he met Jonathan Boucher (1738-1804), a clergyman, philologist, and schoolmaster who was also a native of Cumberland, and who encouraged Sanderson by enlisting him in projects that he himself was involved in. (Boucher was the father of Barton Boucher, q.v.) Sanderson wrote an “Ode to the Genius of Cumberland” for William Hutchinson’s history of the county (1794) and in 1806 an elegy and a prose memoir of Josiah Relph (1712-43) for an edition of Relph’s poetry that is dedicated to Boucher. His own Original Poems, published at Carlisle in 1800 with a very impressive list of subscribers headed by peers and MPs and reaching from London to Madras and the West Indies, was well received. On the strength of that success and backed by some inherited money, he retired from teaching and went to live in a tiny cottage in Kirklinton to pursue his literary interests. Besides essays on a variety of subjects published in magazines and included in his Literary Remains, he brought out a Companion to the Lakes in 1807. He died on 16 Jan. 1829 after suffering severe burns in a fire that had started among his scattered papers overnight; neighbours pulled him from the burning building but he died that evening. He was buried at St. Cuthbert’s, Kirklinton, on 18 Jan. (ODNB 16 Sept. 2024; Rev. J. Lowthian, “Life” in The Life and Literary Remains of Thomas Sanderson [1829], i-lxxix; ancestry.com 16 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 16 Sept. 2024; Morning Post 30 Jan. 1829) HJ