Author: Scafe, John
Biography:
SCAFE, John (1776-1843: ODNB)
The only son of William Scafe of Leazes Tanfield, Durham, a London barrister, and his wife Frances Hodgson, John Scafe was born in London on 19 June 1776 and baptised at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, on 31 July. He matriculated at University College, Oxford, in 1794, aged 17, but did not proceed to a degree. In 1799 he joined the army as an ensign, rising to captain in 1803. Both as a student and as an officer posted to the Mediterranean, he composed poems which he later published, either for friends or for subscribers, with very small print runs. After the death of his father in 1808 he resigned his position and lived on his inheritance as a gentleman of independent means. He never married. He chose to live in Northumberland and joined the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society in 1814. His poems were issued from Alnwick (1815) and Newcastle (1818, 1819) before being taken up by London publishers; by 1838 he had moved to Bamburgh where the 1841 census shows him living as the head of a household with two servants. He died in Bamburgh on 24 Dec. and was buried on 28 Dec., leaving property valued at under £450. Scafe had an unexpected triumph with King Coal’s Levee (1818), a playful poem in heroic couplets about King Coal and “his alluring Queen” Pyrites, after two Oxford dons helped him to expand the poem and add notes for a second edition. He dedicated that and later editions to the Geological Society of London as “a humble attempt to render more popular a science of which daily experience proves the increasing utility.” Goethe was reported to have been planning a German translation. Robert Bakewell (q.v.) addressed the Oxford “Sçavans” in a spoof “critical dissertation” on the poem in his Geological Primer in Verse in 1820. (ODNB 22 Sept. 2024; ancestry.com 22 Sept. 2024; NA will of William Scafe, PROB 11/1493/31) HJ
Other Names:
- I. S.