Author: Stratford, Thomas
Biography:
STRATFORD, Thomas (1735-1786: Lewis)
Born in the village of Togher in County Louth on 8 Aug. 1735, the poet was the eldest son of a farmer, Robert Stratford (d 1784/85). He is said to have a good early education. At age 15 he entered Trinity College where he became the friend of Dr Thomas Wilson and graduated BA (1757). His first employment was as a private tutor in the Nugent family at Westmeath. Now ordained in the Church of Ireland, he was appointed curate in the parish of Scrabby in County Cavan at £50 per year. Lord Belvidere then presented him to a more lucrative living, Gallstown in County Westmeath at £300 per year. He married, in about 1769, Hannah Nugent, the eldest daughter of a relative of his sometime employers, James Nugent of Queen Street, Dublin, by whom he had a single child, Abigail. In 1770, he published a Greek translation of the first book of Paradise Lost and, in 1782, by subscription, The First Book of Fontenoy, a Poem, in Nine Books (Horace Walpole subscribed for ten copies). Having written a tragedy, Lord Russell, in 1782 he transported himself and his family to London in the hope of seeing it performed. Walpole, “with great difficulty,” read the play in draft. He regretted making sport of it because, when he met the poet, he found him to be “so modest, so humble, and so ignorant of the world.” He gained a patron, the Earl of Bellamont, but when on 27 Aug. 1784 Lord Russell was staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane it was at its author’s expense. Notables were in attendance (Charles James Fox, Henry Erskine, and others), and the play ran for four nights, but the reviews were devastating. Having stubbornly turned aside his friends’ advice that he return to Ireland, he stayed in London, impoverished, until shortly before his death in 1786. In about 1794, his sister, Agnes, published, for her own benefit, an edition of Lord Russell and, in about 1795, Stratford’s The Labyrinth, or, The Fatal Embarrassment. (findmypast.com 19 Dec. 2024; London Magazine [Sept. 1784], 234; European Magazine 9 [June 1786], 210; Saunders’s News-Letter, 26 Sept. 1795; C. H. Wilson, Brookiana [1804], 1: 115-72; Alumni Dublinensis [1935], 789; W. S. Lewis et al., Horace Walpole’s Correspondence [1955], 28:85, 28:232) JC