Author: Skene, George
Biography:
SKENE, George (1767-1812: ancestry.com)
It might be his unhappy end that accounts for the shortage of public records about this poet, or it might be the variant spellings of his surname. Only three obscure works are known to have been by him, all of them published in London between 1793 and 1796. The first two appeared anonymously. The “first offspring of a juvenile fancy,” The Genius of Shakespear, is dedicated to John Boydell (1719-1804), alderman and publisher, renowned especially for his lavish “Boydell Shakespeare.” The Sweets and Sorrows of Love celebrates the author’s beloved “Mary.” The more ambitious Donald Bane, by “George Skene Esq.,” with epigraphs in Greek and Latin on the title-page, is dedicated to the Earl of Fife, James Duff (1729-1809), and identifies its primary sources as “the remembrance” of an ancient manuscript belonging to George Skene of Skene, MP (1749-1825), and local oral history. The author was baptised in Aberdeen on 19 Dec. 1767, the son of an army captain, James Skene (brother of Skene of Skene), and his wife Jean Allan. His father died in India in 1796 and he himself may have served for a time in the British army in India. After his return he worked as a clerk in London magistrates’ offices—first at Shadwell and then at Queen Square--and was poised at the time of his death to become a magistrate himself. On 12 Dec. 1789 he married Mary Skene at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, London. (She must have been a cousin; one of the later newspaper reports referred to her as “Lady Fyffe [Fife].”) They had at least one child, probably several, but no reliable baptismal records have been traced. Mary Skene died on 30 Dec. 1805 after an accident on 14 Dec. when her clothing caught fire. In 1810 Skene’s brother John, a lieutenant with the 42nd Highland regiment, died of “Walcheren fever” at Skene’s home in Scotland Yard. In 1812 Skene was found guilty of having forged and counter-signed receipts amounting to about £110, and was sentenced to death. Efforts to secure a pardon having failed, he was executed on 18 Mar. 1812 and buried on 24 Mar. at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where his wife had been buried on 2 Jan. 1806. (ancestry.com 26 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 26 Oct. 2024; Morning Advertiser [London] 2 Jan. 1806; MH 10 Oct. 1810; Bell’s Weekly Messenger 19 Jan. 1812; Drakard’s Stamford News 20 Mar. 1812) HJ