Author: Shephard, Holman
Biography:
SHEPHARD, Holman (1786-1876: ancestry.co.uk)
Born on 28 Sept. 1786 at Bell’s Yard, Doctor’s Commons, London, and baptised "Mark Holman Shephard" on 26 Oct. at St. Gregory by St. Paul, he was the son of John Shephard, proctor to the Bishop of London and deputy registrar, and his wife Mary Ann Birch, who had married at St. Clement Danes in 1785. He early acquired a basic knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and displayed a talent for versification. He entered his father’s office as a copyist and scribe. Around 1813, already subject to religious melancholy, disappointment in love led to despondency and the onset of mental illness. In Oct. 1822 he was confined at the Friends’ Retreat in York, already renowned for its humane treatment of inmates. (Another Quaker poet, Eleanor Dickinson [q.v.], would also be confined there for many years.) He stayed there for almost five years, became a Quaker, and developed a friendship with an attendant, Rebecca Burgess (1796-1861), whom he married on 28 Oct. 1827 at St. Peter's, Leeds. They remained in Yorkshire, moving from Otley to Osbaldwick and then to York, attempting without success to establish a private madhouse themselves but sustained by an annuity following the death of Shephard's mother. After the death of his wife in Oct. 1861, Shephard relapsed and by the spring of 1865, the combination of drugs and alcohol took its toll with him needing to be restrained on occasion. In his final years he was relatively stable and lived with his housekeeper and companion, Sarah Pearson. He died on 8 July 1876 at Harrogate and was buried at Grove Road Cemetery, where a grave still exists. He left an estate of under £3,000. Together with Sarah Evance (q.v.), he is one of the more accomplished Quaker poets. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Aug. 2021; Fruits of a Retired Life . . . With a Memoir [1879], 1-38; Yorkshire Gazette 3 Nov. 1876; Annual Obituary for 1877, 133; Wellcome Institute, York Retreat Archive: Case Notes and Papers, RET/6/5/1/1a, case 268; RET/6/19/1/152) AA