Author: SMITH, J. B.
Biography:
SMITH, J. B. (c. 1788-1837: Evans)
His first name was John but his second is not known. His origins are obscure: internal evidence suggests that his birthplace was “Medway”--so probably Kent. He was a dissenter, educated for the Congregationalist ministry at a dissenting college, but he left the Congregationalists about 1816 to become a Unitarian minister, first at Reading (1819), then at Maidstone (1821-22), and later at Colyton, Devon (1830-32). He was forced out of his position at Colyton and expresses some bitterness in his prefaces. Between 1822 and 1830, and again from 1832 until his death, he preached without charge (i.e. with no formal appointment or salary) and also undertook some tutoring at Seaton, Devon, but he lived in great poverty. He had a wife and a young son: she is reported to have undertaken some work as a seamstress and to have gathered seaweed for the family to eat. (No record has been found of the marriage but Rebecca and John Smith baptised their son Edward Henry at Colyton on 18 Oct. 1829.) His poems were all published by subscription and dedicated to local gentlemen. The most ambitious and best known, Seaton Beach, dedicated to Sir William Templer Pole of Shute House, traces a day in the life of the seaside resort, with passages about the landscape, natural history, and local worthies. Smith was fortunate in coming upon a group of Oxford students who were in Seaton to read during the Long Vacation in 1833: he signed them all up as subscribers. Another poem, “The Fall of Southdown Cliffs,” was advertised but not published. Smith died at Seaton on 4 Apr. 1837 and was buried in the churchyard on 10 Apr. His widow published Shute Park in 1838 and dedicated it again to Pole; it had two later editions. (John Eyre Evans, Colytonia [1898], 25-33; West Country Poets, 421-2; Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 2 [1891], 301-2; ancestry.com 5 Nov. 2024; findmypast.com 5 Nov. 2024) HJ