Author: Thistlethwaite, James
Biography:
THISTLETHWAITE, James (fl 1771-8)
His publication record is the surest guide to establishing the identity of James Thistlethwaite, whose name though uncommon was not unique. His first works emerged as election satires in Bristol in the 1770s; he then moved to London and tried his hand at other genres. The “heroic ballad” Edwald and Ellen (1776) and two novels, The Child of Misfortune (1777) and The Man of Experience (1778), published in London, belong to this period but they were the last writings to appear under his name. He was imprisoned for debt in London in 1776. It seems likely that he was the James Thistlethwaite, a Moravian, who died of consumption at Bristol on 13 Apr. 1790 and was buried on 15 Apr.—possibly at what is now known as “The Strangers Burial Ground” at Clifton. Given his age at death, 38, he might have been the child born to Elizabeth and John Thistlethwaite who was baptised at West Dean, Wiltshire, on 22 Apr. 1750—but that would give a death age of 40. Latimer gives a circumstantial account of his Bristol days: he was apprenticed to a stationer in Corn. St.; he claimed to have known Chatterton (q.v.); and he tried to use his clever libels of “upwards of a hundred Tory citizens” for blackmail. When his victims refused to pay him, he published The Consultation, which did so well that he issued an expanded second edition. According to Latimer, he worked as a bookbinder for a time but then moved to London and was employed as a hack writer by “booksellers and law-stationers.” There was a James Thistlethwaite who married in London in 1788 and was in practice as an attorney on Cannon St. about 1790, but it seems improbable that it should be the same man. If it was, however, he died there and was buried on 13 Jan. 1800, aged 48, at St. Swithin’s London Stone on Cannon St. (ancestry.com 15 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 15 Aug. 2024; John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century [1893], 411-12; London Gazette 1776; EN1) HJ
Other Names:
- Mr. Thistlethwaite