Author: Southerden, Samuel
Biography:
SOUTHERDEN, Samuel (1782-1862: ancestry.com)
pseudonym Brutus Jean-George Bloodman
Baptized at St Mary, Rye, Sussex, on 14 Feb. 1782, the second son of John Southerden (1760-1826) and his wife, Sarah Moss (1760-1845), in his early adulthood, the poet was a soap manufacturer in Grove Road, Mile End, Old Town, London, and before that at 31 Wall Close Square. At Rotherfield, Sussex, on 10 May 1804 he married Hannah Wallis (b 1784). Their children were Hannah (b 1805) and Mary Jane (1807-1869). Incarcerated for debt in King’s Bench Prison in 1813, he fled to the Continent, to Bruges, where he and his wife lived for the next seventeen years. His first book, Censor; or, Gleanings in Sussex (1807), included “writings on slavery, trade, religion, and politics and some poetry, as well as events of the author’s life.” In 1818, in the same year in which his The English Minstrel’s Lay in Flanders appeared, he published an “Extrait des memoires” in the Mercure Belge. Curiously, he signed the memoires with his real name but pretended it was a pseudonym. The subject of the memoires, English expatriate “Brutus Jean-George Bloodman,” purportedly a real person, is a fiction, about whom the reader learns practically nothing. From Flanders, he and his wife moved to St Rollox, Glasgow, where he became a foreman at Charles Tennant & Co, soap makers. At a great public meeting in Glasgow Green in Oct. 1834, he represented the working classes and seconded, “to great applause,” a motion to address the King on the “present perilous crisis in public affairs.” Possibly under political or financial pressure, in 1835 he and Hannah emigrated to New York City, to Elizabeth Street, where he followed his trade as a soap maker and became a naturalized American citizen. Now a man of credibility and local prominence, in the 1850s he was president of the Fulton Building and Mutual Loan Association. Having moved to Canada West in about 1860, he died at Kingston on 1 Sept. 1862. His wife died there in the following year, on 14 Oct. (ancestry.com 19 Nov. 2024; PROB 11/1889; United States census 1850, 1855; Canada West census 1861; Kentish Weekly Post 6 Jan. 1807; London Gazette 1813; Mercure Belge 5 [1818], 345; GM 96:1 [1826], 381; Aberdeen Journal 19 Nov. 1834; New York Daily Herald 20 Oct. 1854; Kingston Whig Standard, 2 Sept. 1862; Kingston Weekly British Whig, 14 Oct. 1863) JC