Author: Stockdale, Percival
Biography:
STOCKDALE, Percival (1736-1811: ODNB)
The only child of the Rev. Thomas Stockdale (d 1755) and his wife, Dorothy Collingwood, the poet was born 26 Oct. 1736 at Branxton, Northumberland. He was educated at the Alnwick grammar school and then at Berwick upon Tweed. A bursary enabled him to attend St Leonard and St Salvador college at St Andrews. When family impoverishment terminated his education, in 1756 he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. He resigned from the army in the following year. He then was ordained deacon in 1759 and curate and lecturer of Duke’s Place, Aldgate, after which he was a curate at Berwick for five years beginning in 1762. He then travelled to Italy for two years, to Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice where he married a woman whom he soon abandoned. Besides his several books of poetry, Stockdale contributed to literature as editor of the Critical Review and the Universal Magazine. As “Agricola” he published letters in the Public Advertiser, against the war in America, against the slave trade, and against cruelty to animals. He died at Lesbury, Northumberland, on 14 Sept. 1811 and was buried at Cornhill-on-Tweed. Complaining in his will that he was “unfortunate and unpopular,” he hoped his literary remains would prove more prosperous than his life had been. The profits from the publication of those remains, he directed, were to be divided between two of his clergyman friends and his friend the novelist Jane Porter. (ODNB 10 Dec. 2024; PROB 11/1529; A. Rounce, Fame and Failure 1720-1800 [2013], 154-93) JC