Author: Thomas, John H.
Biography:
THOMAS, John H. (fl 1826-39)
His name is such a common one that it has not so far been possible to ascertain details of his birth, parentage, marriage, or death. Although his middle name was most probably Henry, public records for the period are nearly all for “John Thomas” alone. His publications, however, offer some clues. Thomas published three collections of poetry in London, two of them explicitly dated from London and all of the same character, with a predominance of sonnets and generally sentimental content (love, loss, death, etc.). Gleanings after Sunset (1832) is dedicated to his mother as reflecting “the first efforts of my pen”; the volume also contains an epitaph for her. Lays of a Minor Poet (1834), published by subscription, responds to the allegedly repeated pleas of friends of the author. Memory’s Musings (1839) is revealed to have been written during a period of extended illness. The subscription list for the Lays consists of 74 names, all of them with London addresses and 54 of them from Doctors’ Commons, the society of practitioners of civil law. These were Thomas’s colleagues, and he would have had a good reputation among them already as author of a three-volume Systematic Arrangement of Coke upon Littleton (1818, 1827, 1836) and co-editor of the most recent and best edition of Coke’s Reports, published in 6 vols. in 1826. (The BL catalogue entries for these works refer to him as John Henry Thomas and give him a birthdate of 1788/9 but that has not been confirmed.) Internal evidence in the poetry collections indicates that Thomas was not a native Londoner, for the places he names and associates nostalgically with his youth are all in Gloucestershire—Leigh Wood, Hambrook, Kingswood. He may have died in London about 1840. (ancestry.com 20 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 20 Aug. 2024; Allibone 3: 2387) HJ