Author: Townsend, Charles
Biography:
TOWNSEND, Charles (1789-1870: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 4 Dec. 1789 and baptised on 11 Mar. 1790 at St. Andrew Undershaft, City of London, the youngest of five sons of Edward Townsend (1756-1830), wine merchant, and Frances Layton (1754-1831), who had married in 1782. His father later retired to Winchester but both parents died at the rectory, St. Peter’s, Preston, Sussex, where Charles Townsend was curate. His friend William Stewart Rose (q.v.) thought him the best Grecian he had ever met, so they may have been schoolmates at Hyde Abbey School, Winchester. He later went to Ipswich school and Emmanuel College Cambridge (Pensioner and Matric. 1809, BA 1813, MA 1817). He was ordained deacon (1813) and priest (1814). He was curate of Brighton, Sussex (1813-25), curate of Preston with Hove, Sussex (1825-37), and then rector of Kingston-by-the-Sea, Sussex (1837-70), a position in the gift of Lord Egremont to whom he dedicated Winchester, with A Few Other Compositions (1835), of which only fifty copies were printed. The post carried a modest annual stipend of £100 but he sought no further preferment and after his parents’ deaths was independently wealthy. He placed quotations from classical authors on the walls of his garden and lived a life of retirement and study. He died on 29 Jan. 1870 at the rectory, Kingston-upon-Sea, leaving an estate of around £12,000 which was administered by a nephew. John Gibson Lockhart singled out two sonnets as favourably comparable to Wordsworth in the Quarterly Review (July 1836, 413): “Written on the Downs, near Brighton” and “On Viewing St. Paul’s from Blackfriars’ Bridge.” Several other sonnets on subjects ranging from the seventeenth-century divine John Norris to the Sussex South Downs and Hawking are also worth another look. He later published A Few Leaves (1860), which contains another nostalgic poem, “On Revisiting Winchester.” Charles Macfarlane called him “poor Townsend” on account of his later obscurity and low stipend but after his death several newspaper reports remembered him as the last member of the famed Holland House circle. (ancestry.co.uk 2 Oct. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 2 Oct. 2023; Boase 6: 700; CCEd 2 Oct. 2023; Sun 5 Feb. 1870; Charles Macfarlane, Reminiscences of a Literary Life [1917], 257-65) AA