Author: Shergold, Samuel
Biography:
SHERGOLD, Samuel (1780-1863: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 4 May 1780 and baptised on 14 May at Brighton, the son of Samuel Shergold, a wealthy vintner, inn owner, sometime banker, and town commissioner and his wife Elizabeth Smithers who had married in 1767. His father owned the highly fashionable Castle Inn in Castle Square with its famous ballroom and also built Marlborough House. He sent his son to Eton and Christchurch, Oxford (matric. 1801). After his father’s death in 1804, Samuel left Oxford without taking a degree. He sold a quarter of the Brighton Royal Pavilion to the Prince of Wales for £1960 in 1815. Thereafter, for unknown reasons, his finances must have greatly deteriorated. He married Annabella Maddocks (1793-1870) at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 17 Oct. 1831, but they had clearly been in a relationship long before then and may even have married earlier privately. They had one son and five daughters. (One daughter, Priscilla, a music teacher, spent her whole life confined in mental institutions.) Their eldest daughter, Annabella, was born in 1820; two daughters, Priscilla and Julia, were born in France in the late 1820s; Fanny was born in Marlow and Rosa in Brighton. Shergold taught classics as a young man, was possibly teaching in France in the 1820s, and edited the Brighton Patriot in the late 1830s but after its failure went to Brussels where he taught languages in the 1840s. By 1851 he had returned to England and the family lived at Belgrave Terrace, Eaton Square. In the 1851 Census he gave his occupation as "Author. General Literature" but none of his publications would have produced much income. In addition to his volume of poetry listed here, he published an edition, hitherto unattributed, of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Vinctus (1822); Petite Grammaire Anglaise (1847); and Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time (1853). In 1854, partly paralysed, he applied to the RLF for assistance and received £20. He applied again the following year but was refused. By 1861, Shergold and his wife and eldest daughter had moved to East Sheen, where he died on 25 May 1863. His wife Annabella survived him and died in 1870. (ancestry.co.uk 25 Aug. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 25 Aug. 2021; Timothy Carder, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton [1990]; RLF, 1/1343; Thomas Milton Kemnitz, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter Sept. 1974, 3-14; Morning Post 28 May 1863; Kentish Mercury 11 June 1870) AA
Other Names:
- S. Shergold