Author: Scott, Thomas
Biography:
SCOTT, Thomas (1705-75: ODNB)
He was born in 1705 at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, while his father Thomas Scott (1679/80-1746) was an Independent minister there; the family moved to Norwich, Norfolk, in 1709. The name of his mother is as yet untraced. His younger sister Elizabeth (1707-76) became a well known hymn writer and emigrated with her first husband to America; one brother became an attorney at Ipswich, Suffolk, while other Scott relatives were merchants in Norwich. All of them subscribed to Scott’s ambitious annotated verse translation of The Book of Job in 1771, as did the Unitarian leaders Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and William Enfield. (Eleven of his hymns were included anonymously in Enfield’s collection of Hymns for Public Worship in 1772.) He was educated for the ministry at the dissenters’ academy in Kibworth, Leicestershire, where he met Philip Doddridge (q.v.) and where he was already composing verses. After a short period as a boarding-school master and occasional preacher in Norfolk, in 1733 he took charge of a congregation at Lowestoft, Suffolk, and in 1738 removed to St. Nicholas’s Presbyterian chapel in Ipswich, where he remained until 1774. There is a record of his marriage at Norwich on 18 Sept. 1734 but it does not include the name of his wife. Their children, of whom there were at least two, were not baptised in a parish church and no birth records have come to light. Besides five published sermons, Scott’s poetic productions before 1770 are quite various in subject and tone. They include a popular moralistic Table of Cebes (1754) and a set of dialogues about fishing, The Anglers (1758). Many of the poems and hymns in Lyric Poems (1773) were chosen for hymnbooks and anthologies throughout the nineteenth century in Britain and North America. In 1774 Scott was chosen to be the minister of an endowed chapel at Hapton, Norfolk, where he died and was buried in the churchyard on 12 Oct. 1775. (ODNB 3 Oct. 2024; ancestry.com 3 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 3 Oct. 2024; Julian, 1020)
Other Names:
- Scott