Author: Spicer, William Henry
Biography:
SPICER, William Henry (1812-1891: ancestry.com)
Inasmuch as it was the son, not the father, who was a man of letters, it is likely, but not certain, that The Last Evening of Catanie [sic]; with Other Poems was written by the younger not by the elder William Henry Spicer (1777-1841). The eldest son of his father and of his father’s wife, Maria Charlotte Prescott (1780-1855), Henry—he generally went by his middle name—was born in London on 18 Feb. 1812. He was baptized at St Marylebone, Westminster, on 11 June. His father, who was a graduate of Eton College, was at the time of the poet’s birth a captain in the Life Guards. He then became deputy paymaster of the army, later, deputy commissioner of the Chelsea Royal Hospital, and finally, the Hospital’s deputy treasurer. Tillotson—who attributes to the younger Henry Spicer The Last Evening of Catanie as “obviously his”—states that he “had a good classical education in a private school.” A barrister who never practiced, he was a student of the Middle Temple from 7 Nov. 1836 and was called to the bar on 17 June 1840. Like his close friend Charles Dickens, he was greatly interested in spiritualism and the theatre. Of the thirteen plays he authored, five were staged; he briefly conducted a theatrical newspaper, The Curtain; and he was the lessee and unofficial manager of the Royal Olympic Theatre from its reopening in 1847 to its destruction by fire in 1849. He wrote and published Night Voices and Other Poems (1844); Old Styles's (1859), a novel he dedicated to Dickens; books and pamphlets on spiritualism, including Sights and Sounds ... an entire History of the American "Spirit" Manifestations (1853), and in the same year, a brief sequel, Facts and Fantasies (1853); ten years later, he published Strange Things Among Us. He also authored several other books. Spicer was a prolific contributor to magazines, to Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, and to Bentley’s Miscellany, the New Monthly Magazine, and Temple Bar. On 30 Oct. 1891 he died, unmarried, at his residence, 4 York Street, Portman Square. At probate, his estate was valued at £2710 15s 5d. (ancestry.com 9 Jan. 2025; The Jurist 4 [1840], 516; J. Foster, Men-at-the-Bar [1885], 440; K. Tillotson, “Henry Spicer, Forster, and Dickens,” Dickensian 74 [1988]: 77-78; J. R. Clube, “Col William Henry Spicer,” Leatherhead & District Local History Society Proceedings 5:8 [1995], 206-10) JC