Author: Sheppard, T.
Biography:
SHEPPARD, T. (fl 1825)
The Samuel Blyth of Portsmouth, Hampshire, who is remembered in T. Sheppard’s Poetic Sketches was a local solicitor who died on 14 Aug. 1825 at the age of 32 “after a short illness” and was buried at St. Mary’s, Portsea, on 16 Aug. The poet who lamented him reveals in a footnote that he had been the father of one of the friends of Blyth’s youth, a boy who was also planning a career in law but who died aged 17 (about 1810). He was probably but not certainly the Thomas Sheppard (1741-1827) who was buried at St. Mary’s, Portsea, on 2 Dec. 1827, aged 86. The book contains a prose memoir of Blyth; a verse tribute; and three or four shorter poems, the most ambitious being a comic anecdote about two talkative farmers. In the preface Sheppard mentions that he is working on a book about Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, but that does not appear ever to have been published. Beyond these details, identification is difficult. There were several Sheppard (or Shepperd or Shepherd) families in Hampshire, with many Thomases to choose from, but none of them seems a perfect match for this man. (One Thomas Sheppard, as Captain of the Brazilian ship Piranga, brought Thomas Cochrane [1775-1860] back from his adventures in South America to a hero’s welcome in Portsmouth in the month before Blyth died.) He might be the Thomas Sheppard who, as a widower, married Mary Sexty in Hampshire on 9 Dec. 1782: the boy who died could have been a son from this second marriage. But no corresponding burial record has been found for the young man in Portsmouth or Portsea, and he may have died away from home—or not have been of that family at all. (ancestry.com 29 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 29 Oct. 2024; T. Sheppard, Poetic Sketches [1825?]; Hampshire Chronicle 4 July 1825, 15 Aug. 1825)