Author: Stephenson, William
Biography:
STEPHENSON, William (1763-1836: ancestry.com)
Known locally as “the Tyneside Minstrel,” the elder William Stephenson was born 28 June 1763 at Gateshead, Durham, the son of John Stephenson and his wife, Margaret Clarke. The poet married Jane Sharp on 23 May 1784 at Gateshead. Their only child, William (1797-1838), became a printer, publisher, auctioneer, songwriter, and poet. Apprenticed to James Atkinson of Church Street, Gateshead, in early adulthood he was a clock and watchmaker. Then, following a “severe accident,” he opened a school at Gateshead, on the Church Stairs, where he was master. He died at Gateshead on 12 Aug. 1836 and was buried there two days later. The elder William Stephenson is mostly remembered for two poems published in the book his son printed in 1832, A Collection of Local Poems, Songs, &c. &c., “The Quayside Shaver” and “The Skipper’s Wedding.” Both poems first appeared, unsigned, in the younger John Bell’s 1812 Rhymes of Northern Bards. “The Skipper’s Wedding” also appeared in print in 1819 in A Collection of Songs, Comic and Satirical and, as “The Newcastle Wedding,” in the 1824 The Universal Songster and the 1831 The Vocal Annual. “The Quayside Shaver” was published in 1812 in The Newcastle Songster and in 1819 in A Collection of Songs, Comic and Satirical. A third song from the 1832 Collection also was a reprint: “The Dying African,” signed “S.S.,” was published in Nov. 1791 in the Scots Magazine and in GM and it was reprinted in 1806 in The Evening Fire-side, Or Literary Miscellany. (ancestry.com 20 Nov. 2034; Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs and Readings with Lives, Portraits, and Autographs of the Writers, and Notes on the Songs [1891], 119-28) JC