Author: Sayers, Frank
Biography:
SAYERS, Frank (1763-1817: ODNB)
The son of a merchant, Francis Sayers (1724-1764), who originated in Great Yarmouth, and his wife Anne Morris (d. 1790), also Great Yarmouth, he was born 3 Mar. 1763 in East Ham, Essex. Following a year at a boarding school at North Walsham, in 1774 he entered Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s (q.v.) school at Palgrave where he met his lifelong friend, a charismatic Unitarian, William Taylor (q.v.). Following an unhappy turn at business, in 1783 he lived with his mother at Thorpe near Norwich. For the next five years, he divided his time between Edinburgh and London studying medicine; he obtained the M.D. but soon abandoned that career. In 1788 at the University of Harderwijk, his study of Hume led him into atheism. Following a mental breakdown, in 1789 he returned to his mother at Norwich. Stricken by her death in 1790, he rapidly reversed his convictions. From political radical and religious sceptic, he became an anti-Jacobin conservative and devoted communicant of the Church of England. Also in 1790 he briefly became famous with the publication by the radical London bookseller Joseph Johnson of his most significant work, Dramatic Sketches of Ancient Norse Mythology. His imitation of archaic voices in those verses was a watershed in the history of Romantic literature. Robert Southey (q.v.), who claimed to be strongly influenced by him, reviewed Sayers’s collected works in the Jan. 1827 QR. He was buried alongside his mother in Norfolk Cathedral on 11 Aug. 1817; his monument in the cathedral pavement states he died 6 Aug., as does William Taylor in his memoir of Frank Sayers (ODNB incorrectly gives 16 Aug.). Besides Taylor, his closest friends included a prominent Norwich lawyer and antiquary, Thomas Amyot; Edward Temple Booth, the wealthy owner of a Norwich worsted mill; the Rev. Paul Whittingham, a local vicar and minor canon of Norwich; Archbishop of Canterbury Charles Manners-Sutton; the Whig politician Sir James Mackintosh; and the Norfolk banker Hudson Gurney. To each of those men he left legacies in his will. (ODNB 3 Mar. 2023. F. Sayers, Collective Works of the Late Dr. Sayers, to Which Have Been Prefixed some Biographic Particulars by W. Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols [1823]; D. Chandler, ‘Southey’s “German Sublimity” and Coleridge’s “Dutch Attempt”’, Romanticism on the Net 32-33 [Nov. 2003-Feb. 2004] 3 Mar. 2023) JC
Other Names:
- F. Sayers
- Dr. Sayers