Author: Spencer, John
Biography:
SPENCER, John (1703-70: findmypast.com)
Almost everything that is known about Spencer comes from the 1781 Memoirs by his old friend and literary executor William Hilton, q.v. He was an only child, born on 11 May 1703 in the village of Netherseal, Derbyshire, where his father was a mat-maker. The names of his parents are not known but his father lived until 1769 and died at the age of 93. Spencer suffered serious bouts of illness in youth and his schooling was affected, but he spent seven years in a free school at Appleby and began taking pupils himself at the age of fifteen, passing from village schools to private tutoring in Leicestershire and London. In 1727 he accepted a position in the household of the Northumberland family of Lord Tankerville. He accompanied Tankerville’s son to Winchester School, where he was able to improve on his own irregular education, and resigned his place when the young man started on his Grand Tour, choosing instead an occupation that would give him some independence. He spent the rest of his working life as a “Land-waiter” in the customhouse at Newcastle, living in lodgings and never marrying. He and Hilton, who lodged in the same house, became close friends. Spencer, who had up to that point managed to publish very little of his poetry, showed his long pastoral poem Hermas to Hilton in 1750 and Hilton became a lifelong advocate for it. In 1764 Spencer retired to London, where Hilton visited him in 1768. After Spencer’s death from an “asthmatic disorder” in Jan. 1770, Hilton returned to the city to arrange for Spencer’s burial on 21 Jan. at St. James, Clerkenwell, and to take charge of his papers. A newspaper notice refers to Spencer as “distinguished among the Literati above forty years ago” but that would seem an exaggeration. Hilton dedicated Hermas to Lord Tankerville and in the Memoirs provided a list of further poetical miscellanies amounting to about 4000 lines that he had ready for publication. The whereabouts of the ms of that proposed volume is not known. Although Hilton quotes extensively from a favourable review of Hermas, MR was unforgiving and there cannot have been much demand for more. (findmypast.com 18 Nov. 2024; William Hilton, Memoirs of the late John Spencer, gent., of Newcastle upon Tyne [1781]; Bath Chronicle 25 Jan. 1770; MR 47 [July 1772], 69) HJ