Author: Spence, William Steers
Biography:
SPENCE, William Steers, formerly STEERS (c. 1789-1856: ancestry.co.uk)
He was, according to the 1851 census return, born at Robertsbridge, Sussex, but he is not recorded in the baptismal registers and the identities of his parents cannot yet be established. Nothing is known of his education. As William Steers he published Leisure Hours (1811) and married Jane Mary Shipp (1800-47), the daughter of a Blandford bookseller, in 1817. They had one daughter and four, possibly five sons. By 1820 he had changed his name to William Steers Spence and published a second collection of poems under that name. From 1824 he toured various towns--Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Wimborne and others--and advertised himself as “An Ingenious Artist with Scissors” producing profile busts and silhouettes. He claimed to have done 30,000 profiles but very few have survived. In the early 1830s he lived with his family at Byron Cottage, West Melbury, on the outskirts of Shaftesbury, Dorset, and appears to have stopped touring. By 1841 his fortunes had declined and the family were living alongside the families of a quarry labourer and a laundress at Monkton Coombe, near Bath, Somerset. His wife died in 1847 and by 1851 he was in the Alcester Liberty workhouse at Shaftesbury, recorded as a widower, pauper and late artist. He probably later moved to be with his son, Henry Steers Spence (1835-67), at Bath, where he died in poverty at Westgate Buildings on 11 Feb. 1856, aged 66, and was buried at Bath Abbey. (ancestry.co.uk 3 June 2024; findmypast.co.uk 3 June 2024; Sue McKechnie, British Silhouette Artists and Their Work: 1760-1860 [1978], 273; Northampton Mercury 9 Apr. 1825; Hampshire Advertiser 10 Nov. 1827; Leamington Spa Courier 21 Jan. 1832; Wells Journal 23 Feb. 1856; GRO death cert.) AA
Other Names:
- W. Steers Spence
- W. Steers