Author: Trotter, John Bernard
Biography:
TROTTER, John Bernard (1774-1818: DIB)
He was born on 26 Dec.; the ODNB gives a birth year of 1775 but all other sources have 1774. He was one of three sons of Mary (Dickson) and the Rev. Edward Trotter, rector of Inch, prebendary of St. Andrew’s, Downpatrick, and agent for the Southwell estate. He was educated at the diocesan grammar school in Downpatrick and matriculated at Trinity College Dublin in 1790, graduating BA in 1795. He was originally intended for the church but preferred a career in law, and entered the Temple, London, as a student. He met Charles James Fox and, like Fox, was opposed to the Act of Union. His first publication was a pamphlet, An Investigation into the Legality and Validity of a Union (1799). With the 1802 peace of Amiens, he travelled to France with Fox. In the same year, he was called to the Irish bar. He served as Fox’s private secretary and was with him when Fox died in 1806. Returning to Ireland, he published a novel, Stories for Calumniators (1809), attempted several periodicals which folded after a few issues, and inaugurated the Dublin Harp Society. However, he overspent on a lavish lifestyle and, retreating from Dublin, tried to recover financially by publishing Memoirs of the Latter Years of Fox (1811); the book went to three editions but proved very controversial. Trotter’s increasingly dire financial circumstances led him to seek a government post but he rejected as an insult the one George Canning offered. He was living in a derelict cabin when he was arrested for debt and held first in the Wexford Marshalsea and then in a Dublin jail—where he married a young woman (first name Jane). On his release, he published Leipsick but he could not find a publisher for a second much longer poem. Applications for his relief were made to the RLF in June and Sept. 1818; he was awarded £40. When he died from dysentery on 29 Sept. 1818 he was living in extreme poverty in Hammond’s Marsh, Cork. In Nov. 1818 the RLF paid Jane Trotter a further £10. Trotter's 1819 Walks Through Ireland in the years 1812, 1814, and 1817 was issued posthumously (probably by his friend, William Liddiard, q.v.) and is his most enduring work. (ODNB 27 Nov. 2020; DIB 27 Nov. 2020; John Magee, “The Gowrie Conspiracy and the Trotters of Down,” Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review 2 [1991] 31-39; RLF file 376) SR