Author: Stevens, William Bagshaw
Biography:
STEVENS, William Bagshaw (1756-1800: ODNB)
The son of an apothecary and surgeon, William Stevens, and his wife Susanna Bagshaw, he was born at Abingdon, Berkshire, on 15 Mar. 1756. He attended grammar school at Abingdon and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a scholarship student or “demy” (matric. 1772, BA 1776, MA 1779, BD and DD 1797). While still an undergraduate, he published his Indian Odes by subscription, gathering a lengthy list of names mostly from Oxford colleges but also from addresses in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and other counties. Some of his subscribers were clergymen and their families; a few were aristocrats. The volume is dedicated to Lord North. Upon graduation in 1776 Stevens accepted the position of assistant master at Repton Free School in Derbyshire. When the Master died in 1779, Stevens was promoted in his place and announced minor reforms, such as taking boarders in the Master’s house. In the same year, he was appointed domestic chaplain to Sir Robert Burdett (1716-97) of the nearby manor house, Foremark Hall. Stevens never married. The journal that he began in 1791 and that caused a stir when it was published in 1965 reveals his hopeless love for the heiress Frances (Fanny) Coutts (1773-1832), who married the Marquess of Bute in 1800. It also records his constant search for preferment in the church, since he disliked schoolteaching and wanted to improve his income. He had been ordained as deacon in 1778 but deferred ordination as priest until 1798, at which point he was made rector of Seckington and vicar of Kingsbury (both in Warwickshire), thanks mainly to the intervention of his good friend Sir Francis Burdett (1770-1844), who was the heir of Sir Robert and the husband of one of the other Coutts daughters, Sophia. But he died at Repton after “a short illness” (GM) on 28 May 1800 and was buried in the churchyard there on 2 June. (ODNB 1 Dec. 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; MR 53 [Sept. 1775], 263; Leicester and Nottingham Journal 31 July 1779; GM Sept. 1800, 897) HJ