Author: Travers, Dennis
Biography:
TRAVERS, Dennis (fl 1828)
Random Rhymes from Paris; with Other Poems (1828) is a curious book, apparently the only one by this author. The title poem, as the MR reviewer grumpily observed, is an imitation of Byron’s (q.v.) facetious and wildly popular Beppo. A prefatory note dated from Paris indicates that the writer had intended to publish there but, encountering delays, chose London instead. A few prose notes at the end disclose something of his social status. He uses French and Latin frequently and with ease, alludes casually to his travels (Berne “last summer,” Lyons “not long ago”), and drops the names of minor aristocrats such as “the Countess of O., at whose house I met him.” The volume is dedicated to the earl of Albemarle, William Charles Keppel (1772-1849), not as a personal acquaintance but as someone widely admired and whose Whig politics Travers would have agreed with. The name Dennis Travers, even allowing for variants, is unusual in the UK. Although no biography or birth record has been found it seems very likely that he was French by birth. There are records for a Thérèse Denise Travers, the daughter of Jean Joseph (sic) Edouard Travers and his wife Marie Catherine Fouchet, who was born at Versailles about 1790, married Hippolyte Sinonin (possibly Pinonin) there in 1809, and as the widow of Sinonin was awarded a civil pension in 1857. There are still Traverses in Versailles. No further information about Dennis Travers, presumably her brother and about the same age, has as yet come to light. (ancestry.com 6 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 6 Sept. 2024; MR 99 [1822], 212-13) HJ