Author: Swain, Charles
Biography:
SWAIN, Charles (1801-74: ODNB)
"The Manchester Poet," born and bred, he was the son of John Swain and his French wife Caroline Tavaré. (Although his gravestone reads 1803, the baptismal record is from Feb. 1801 recording his birth on Jan. 4 that year.) After an education at the private school of a Manchester clergyman, he started work at the age of fifteen in a dye-works of which his uncle Charles Tavaré was part-owner. His first collection of poetry was dedicated to the same uncle in 1827: Swain had been contributing essays and poems to local periodicals since 1822. He married Ann Glover in 1827 and the couple went on to have six children, four of whom lived to be adults. About 1830 he left the dye-works and set up as a bookseller, but the enterprise was not a success and instead he joined a firm of engravers and lithographers, eventually buying and managing the engraving side himself. His interest in the visual arts is sometimes expressed in his essays and poems--as in his prose Memoir of the Manchester artist Henry Liverseege (1815). Swain continued to the end of his life to write for periodicals and annuals and to issue occasional collections of verse, notable later ones including poems about the female characters of Byron and Scott (in the Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, 1844), and English Melodies (1849). His poem Dryburgh Abbey is generally dated 1832 but no copy has been found of a UK edition from that year. He was appointed an honorary professor of poetry at the Manchester Royal Institution, where he lectured on modern poets in 1846; in 1856 he was granted a civil-list pension of £50. He died of an epileptic fit at Prestwich House, Prestwich, near Manchester, and is buried in the Prestwich churchyard. (ODNB 28 Oct. 2020; Goodridge Oct. 2020; Spenserians) HJ
Other Names:
- C. Swain