Author: Sansom, James
Biography:
SANSOM, James (1751-1822: ancestry.com)
Born in London on 20 Oct. 1751, he was one of five children of John Sansom (d c. 1769) and Mary Sleepe (1715?-1778). Mary was a sister of Esther Burney, the novelist Frances Burney’s (q.v.) mother. His younger brother was Francis Sansom (q.v.). On 19 May 1778 at St. Martin in the Fields, London, he married Amelia Cole (or Amy Coules as she signed herself on their marriage record). No record of her death has been located but on 24 July 1790 Sansom married Elizabeth Margaret Wood (1763-1830) at St. Mary Aldermanbury. Both marriages appear to have been childless. He worked as a coachman at Greenwich and as the younger Charles Burney’s factotum. Though hardly wealthy themselves, the Burneys gave considerable support to the Sansoms in the form of money and gifts. Dr. Charles Burney supported his 1817 application to the RLF for relief; he was awarded £10. In 1819, by which time Sansom was losing his sight, the RLF granted him £20. The preface and poetry of his 1808 volume, Greenwich, A Poem, Descriptive and Historical (1808), dedicated to “E.M.S.”, are articulate and knowledgeable. Its list of subscribers suggests the Burneys helped him produce and distribute Greenwich. In addition to the Prince of Wales, there are in the list many interesting names: ten Burney family members and several students who graduated from Charles Burney’s Greenwich school; the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (q.v.); members of the Basevi family, relatives of the man of letters Isaac D’Israeli (q.v.); the professor of poetry at Oriel College, Oxford, Edward Copleston; Willmott family members, wealthy paper manufactures at Shoreham, Kent; members of the Bicknell family of Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, including John Laurens Bicknell (q.v.), who married a Willmott; members as well of the Ogle family of Kirkley, Northumberland, among them a prebendary of Durham, a canon of Salisbury, and a captain, later admiral, in the Royal Navy; and several guardians and stewards—including Burneys—of the Asylum for Orphan Girls and of the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. Sansom’s address at the time of his death was Fetter Lane and Fleet Street. He was buried in St Dunstan-in-the-West on 31 Mar. 1822. There is no known record of the exact date of his death. (ancestry.com 24 Mar. 2023; findmypast.com 24 Mar. 2023; RLF file 359; F. Burney, The Early Letters and Journals, ed. L. E. Troide [1988], 171 and note; L. Clark, “Frances Burney and the Marketplace”, Lumen, 38 [2019], 31-52) JC
Other Names:
- J. Sansom