Author: Thoms, Peter Perring
Biography:
THOMS, Peter Perring (1790-1855: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 15 Mar. 1790 and baptised on 30 Mar. at St. Martin’s, Exeter, the son of Alexander Thoms (1741-1831), chairmaker, and his wife Catherine (1752-1837) (maiden name unknown). Nothing is known of his early education but he worked as a compositor in London before obtaining a post with the East India Company. He left England on 9 Apr. 1814 and arrived in Macau on 2 Sept. At a salary of £300 per annum, he was to assist and typeset the evangelical missionary and scholar Robert Morrison’s (1782-1834) Dictionary of the Chinese Language (6 vols. Macau 1815-23). As an artisan-autodidact he had good relations with Chinese assistants and admired Chinese culture, translating two works: The Affectionate Pair, or the History of Sun-Kin (1820) and Chinese Courtship. In Verse (1824). He returned to England reluctantly in 1825 and worked for many years as a printer and stereotyper, operating from 12 Warwick Square, Newgate Street, Clerkenwell. He underwent bankruptcy proceedings several times in the 1840s and 1850s but maintained his interest in Chinese culture, writing about its history (“China: Its Early History,” Westminster Review 1840), defending its language (Monthly Magazine 1836, reprinted as The Emperor of China v. The Queen of England in 1853), promoting the skills of its artisans in A Dissertation on the Ancient Chinese Vases (1851), and showcasing the work of the wood-block engraver, A-lae, at the Great Exhibition (1851). He married Jane Dobson Butler (1799-1872) on 10 May 1827 at her parish church of Saint Luke’s, Old Street, Finsbury. They went on to have two children who were also baptised there. He died on 22 Dec. 1855 at Foley Terrace, Pentonville, and was buried at Victoria Park Cemetery, Hackney, on 29 Dec. His wife, Jane Thoms, died in 1872 leaving an estate of just under £600. She does not appear to have suffered penury after his financial affairs were wound up in Nov. 1856 and in her later years kept house for her son, John Alexander Thomas (1829-92), who also became a printer. (ancestry.co.uk 26 Apr. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 26 Apr. 2024; London Gazette [multiple issues]; Robson’s London Directory [1832]; Post Office London Directory 1845, 1856; LES 27 Dec. 1855; BL, IOR, B/158, 1191-93; Patricia Sieber, “Universal Brotherhood Revisited: Peter Perring Thoms [1790-1855], Artisan Practices, and the Genesis of a Chinacentric Sinology,” Representations 130 [2015], 28-59) AA