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Author: Thomas, John Wesley

Biography:

THOMAS, John Wesley (1798-1872: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 4 Aug. 1798 at Cullompton, near Exeter, Devon, and baptised on 4 Sept. at Mint Lane Chapel, Exeter (Wesleyan), the fourth of nine children of John Thomas, tradesman and preacher, and his wife Elizabeth Ayears, who had married in 1787. His elder brother Elias also became a Wesleyan preacher. As a child he had intense religious experiences and at nineteen went to London wanting to become a missionary. He was selected for the itinerant ministry in England and for over fifty years preached in various locations before age forced him to largely retire to Dumfries, Scotland, around 1863. He married Louisa Drayton on 19 June 1828 at Barrington, Somerset. They had seven children, five of whom survived him, with two sons also becoming ministers. He was largely self-educated and acquired several languages. He contributed regularly to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine and occasionally to Notes and QueriesAn Apology for “Don Juan” (1824) is an attack on Byron’s irreligion in a good-natured and accomplished parody of his style. His Lyra Britannica, or, Select Beauties of Modern English Poetry (1830), is a knowledgeable anthology of the major Romantic poets (including Kirk White, Hemans and Landon, qq.v.) with fourteen of his own poems (signed J. W. T.) somewhat presumptuously included. He also wrote The War of the Surplice: A Poem in Three Cantos(1845) and his later verse is mostly religious. Poems on Sacred, Classical, Mediaeval, and Modern Subjects (1867) collects most of his verse from 1822 to 1867 but does not reprint the parody of Byron (although he had reprinted it in 1855). His translation of Dante with extensive notes, The Trilogy, or Dante’s Three Visions (1859-62) suffers from his poor poetic ability and oddly views Dante as closer to Wesleyan Methodism than to traditional Roman Catholicism. He died at Dumfries on 7 Feb. 1872. (ODNB 25 Jul. 2022; Lewis 2: 1095; Western Times 28 June 1828, 13 Feb. and 5 Mar. 1872; Gilbert F. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography 1782-1900 [1965], 102-8) AA

 

Books written (2):

[London]: printed by T. Green, 1824
London: John Stephens, John Mason, and Simpkin and Marshall, 1830