Author: Stagg, John
Biography:
STAGG, John (1770-1824: ODNB)
According to Sidney Gilpin, the sole source we have about Stagg’s life, he was born at Burgh by Sands, near Carlisle, the son of a tailor who possessed a small property. There are a couple of matches in genealogical sources but no corroboration. His parents hoped he would enter the church but an accident resulting in blindness ruined his prospects. Thereafter “he eked out an existence for some years“ by keeping a library in Wigton and playing the fiddle at “weddings, merrie-meets, village wakes, and social parties” (Gilpin, 80-1). He married Margaret (Peggy) Hobson on 30 Jan. 1790 at Burgh by Sands. They went on to have seven children. In the same year he produced his first collection by subscription “under all the disadvantages of pinching poverty and blindness.” About 1806 he joined a touring amateur dramatic company, then briefly moved to Carlisle, but eventually settled in Manchester where he was to remain for the rest of his life (although he returned frequently to Cumbria). Like many labouring-class poets, he was an itinerant seller of his volumes, often accompanied by his daughter Eliza. He found patrons in Charles Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the Cumberland gentry and members of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In The Minstrel of the North (1810) he complained of “romance mania” but noted the success of “Lewis, Wadsworth [sic], Southey, and Scott” in the genre and resolved to follow them. Thereafter his work is marked by a turn towards Gothic and Romantic tales, culminating in an extensive selection of his work in The Cumberland Minstrel and the large posthumous collection, Legendary, Gothic, and Romantic Tales, published in Shrewsbury for reasons unknown. This volume also contain 78 sonnets which have been overlooked. He also edited an anthology, The Magazine of the Muses. Gilpin and ODNB give an incorrect year of death. He died, aged 55, on 15 Feb. 1824 at Workington, Cumbria, and was buried two days later. (ODNB 22 Nov. 2022; Sidney Gilpin, The Popular Poetry of Cumberland and the Lake Country [1875], 80-93; ancestry.co.uk 22 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 22 Nov. 2022; Lancaster Gazette 28 Feb. 1824; Johnson, items 850-57) AA
Other Names:
- J. Stagg