Author: Snow, Joseph
Biography:
SNOW, Joseph (1784-1860: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 18 Sept. 1784 and baptised on 17 Oct. at St. Michael Bassishaw, City of London, one of seven children of Joseph Snow, a prosperous shag manufacturer and plush goods merchant in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and his first wife, Frances Elizabeth Dobson, who had married in London in 1779. She died on 14 June 1788, aged 31; his father then married Sarah Newman on 27 May 1790. Nothing is known of his education but as his father’s only son, he may have entered the family business. By 1821, however, his business had failed and he applied to the Royal Literary Fund for assistance. Fortuitously, the following year he became Secretary to the RLF and held the position until 1836. He left to run the Merthyr Guardian newspaper with modest success but returned to London in 1840,when he again applied for assistance. He then became Secretary to Queen Adelaide’s Lying-In Hospital for poor women in Marylebone, and remained there until 1843 when he resigned because he thought it insolvent and badly run. He again applied to the RLF and in December 1843 was awarded £20. He applied in 1851 and was refused but a place was found for him as a Poor Scholar at the Charterhouse in Farringdon, London, where he remained until January 1860, when he petitioned the governors and complained it was neither an “Asylum of Peace” nor a “Religious RetreatHe probably left soon afterwards and went to stay with a friend. He died at Britannia Square, Worcester, on 3 May 1860 and was buried at St. Peter’s. He never married. In addition to the works listed here, he published Light in Darkness or Sermons in Stones (1845) with the second edition, entitled Lyra Memorialis (1847), also reprinting Wordsworth’s “Essay on Epitaphs” of 1810. (ancestry.co.uk 14 July 2023; findmypast.co.uk 14 July 2023; RLF 452; edpopehistory.co.uk; OUCH 20 Sept. 1806; Worcester Journal5 May 1860; Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian 12 May 1860; Nigel Cross, The Common Writer [1985], 78-81; Baptism and Burial Register of Banbury [1984]) AA
Other Names:
- J. Snow
- Jos. Snow