Author: Shoel, Thomas
Biography:
SHOEL, Thomas (c. 1759-1823: ancestry.co.uk)
He was probably born in 1759 at Montacute, Somerset, one of several children of Samuel Shoel, a saddler and harness-maker and later a stone merchant, and his wife Miriam Hann, who had married at her parish of Crewkerne, Somerset, on 30 May 1749. (The Montacute register [1677-1769] is missing the entries for 1759-61. Poems on Various Subjects [1821] contains a poem on his sixtieth birthday but is undated.) His father went bankrupt in 1766 and thereafter the family struggled. He was sent to a local day school and learned writing and arithmetic. He left home at seventeen in search of work as a weaver but his delicate constitution and ill-health meant that he drifted into poverty, doing odd jobs as village courier and hedger. He displayed an early talent for poetry and music and hawked his productions around local villages. In addition to the works listed here, he contributed a number of poems to the Sherborne periodical The Weekly Entertainer: or, Agreeable and Instructive Repository(1783-1819) which gave an account of his life (possibly written by him): “The present state of the poet is truly wretched, clad in a ragged, loose, filthy dress, the long used donation of a charitable friend. Pennyless and disconsolate, Shoel’s greatest enemy is his appearance, which he cannot remedy.” He married Phyllis Bool on 3 May 1782 at Montacute. They had perhaps as many as six children, most of whom died in infancy. He then married Mary Taunton on 2 July 1797, also at Montacute, and had three more daughters. He also seems to have had a daughter in 1799, Amy, with another local woman, Unity Murley. He died on 20 Oct. 1823 at Montacute, leaving a widow and three children unprovided for. Llewelyn Powys, whose father was vicar at Montacute, wrote an appreciative essay, giving details of the lives of Thomas Shoel’s children but no exact dates for Shoel himself. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Nov. 2024; findmypast.co.uk; Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury 27 Oct. 1823; “Biographical Anecdotes of Thomas Shoel, ”The Weekly Entertainer 31 Aug. 1818, 685-6; Llewelyn Powys, “Thomas Shoel,” Somerset Essays [1937], 131-51) AA
Other Names:
- T. Shoel