Author: TOMLINS, Thomas Edlyne
Biography:
TOMLINS, Thomas Edlyne (1762-1841: ODNB)
Thomas Edlyne was the eldest in the large family of Thomas Tomlins (1735-1815), a London solicitor and Clerk of the Painter-Stainers’ Company, and his wife Elizabeth Isabella Guest (1740-1818); his younger sister was Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins, q.v. Born in London on 4 Jan. 1762 and baptised on 15 Jan., he was educated at St. Paul’s School and Queen’s College, Oxford (matric. 1778), but did not proceed to a degree. He studied law at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1783. He had a distinguished and productive career as a lawyer, highlights of which included his serving as counsel to the chancellor of the exchequer for Ireland (1801-16), assistant counsel to the Treasury (1818-31), bencher of the Inner Temple (1823) and its Treasurer (1827). He was knighted in 1814. He published voluminously on the law: the GM obituary includes a long list of titles and notes that he had almost single-handedly prepared the approved edition of the Statutes of the Realm (from 1810). Neither GM nor ODNB mentions his collaboration with his sister in their volume of poetry, Tributes of Affection (1797), but it does demonstrate both his affectionate character and his literary taste. Just over half of the volume consists of occasional poems written by him, starting in 1783 when he was called to the bar. In the same period, after qualifying as a barrister, he was also for “some years” (New Court Gazette) the editor of the daily newspaper The St. James’s Chronicle. He would have been in a good position to encourage and support his sister with her frequent contributions to periodicals, had she needed to seek guidance. On 21 Dec. 1793 he married Elizabeth Chapman at St. Mary’s, Lambeth, Surrey. The marriage was childless, and after his retirement from the Treasury in 1831 and the death of his wife about 1834, Tomlins went to live in York. The 1841 census records his address as Tower Place, St. Mary Castlegate, which is where he died on 1 July and was buried on 3 July at St. Mary’s. (ODNB 2 Sept. 2024; GM 16 [1841], 321-2; findmypast.com 2 Sept. 2024; Alumni Oxonienses) HJ
Other Names:
- E. Tomlins