Author: Shewell, John Talwin
Biography:
SHEWELL, John Talwin (1782-1866: ancestry.com)
He was born in London but spent most of his life in or near Ipswich. His parents, Ann (Talwin) and Thomas Shewell "of the Stock Exchange," were Quakers. From a Quaker school in Wandsworth John joined a linen-draper's business in Ipswich, was taken into partnership with the widow when the owner died, and eventually took over as proprietor. He served as a minister and mentor in the Quaker community. The business did well enough that he was able to indulge a taste for literature and to travel--notably in a long journey on the Continent in 1824. (His early Tribute to Cowper, however, was the only literary work published in his lifetime.) In 1825 he took into partnership Edward Corder, who had married his sister Sarah. He retired from business in 1831 and married Elizabeth Peckover in 1833. In 1840 they moved to Rushmere, in the countryside near Ipswich, where he later died. They did not have children but family and friends, led by his widow and his nephew Alfred Corder, compiled a Memoir (1870) that includes selections from his travel diary and forty pages of "fugitive poems." Elizabeth Shewell died a year later. (ancestry.com 17 Sept. 2020; Memoir of John Talwin Shewell [1870]; William Wistar Comfort, "William Cowper and the Friends in England and America," Bulletin of the Friends' Historical Society of Philadelphia 10:1 [1920] 2-11; contributions from AA)
Other Names:
- I. T. S.