Author: Shillito, Charles
Biography:
SHILLITO, Charles (1758-94: Bensusan-Butt)
He was baptised on 26 Jan. 1758 at All Saints, Colchester, Essex, the second son of Ephraim Shillito (1727-91), a card maker and insurance agent, and his wife Elizabeth Parsley (1731-1813), who had married in London in 1748. He was educated at the Free School, Colchester, but then joined his father in business. When Shillito was twenty-one, he took a position as a maritime merchant’s clerk. Shortly afterwards, The Sea-Fight (1779), a tale of a press-ganged young man at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, was published. On 16 Oct. 1779, during the American War of Independence, he was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Marines at Plymouth. He married Susanna(h) (“Sukey”) Griffin on 10 October 1780 at St. Peter and St. Paul, Bath. They went on to have six children. At the end of the war he returned to Colchester and became active in local politics as well as writing two farces, Transformation, or Spanish Philosophy (1786) and The Man of Enterprise (1789). He also became active in charity schools and was Master at the Church of England Charity School, Colchester, which carried a salary of £50 p.a., a house, and other emoluments. By 1790 he was also Secretary to the Constitutional Club which met at the White Hart Inn. After his father’s death in 1791, he succeeded him as the Agent for the Sun Fire-Office, the largest insurer of private and commercial buildings in England. He appears to have suffered from “Hyponchondriac Melancholy” and on 19 June 1794 he was found “hanging upon a tree in the parish of Springfield” and identified by papers in his pocket as the man who had gone missing from Colchester “in a deranged state” (Ipswich Journal). The County Coroner recorded a verdict of Lunacy. He was buried at Springfield, near Chelmsford. (J. Bensusan-Butt, Essex in the Age of Enlightenment [2009], 87-122; Shani d’Cruz, A Pleasing Prospect: Society and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Colchester [2008], 68-73; Bath Chronicle 16 Oct. 1780; Ipswich Journal 21 June 1794; ancestry.co.uk 30 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 30 Aug. 2022; David Rivers, Living Authors of Great Britain [1798] 2: 261; Watkins, 315) AA