Author: Turner, Charles
Biography:
TURNER, Charles (1781-1820: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 25 Mar. 1781 and baptised on 17 Nov. 1782 at Bombay, the son of Major Charles Turner. His mother’s name was not given: she may have been the Elizabeth Young who married Charles Turner on 28 Aug. 1775 at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, London, but a marriage in India cannot be discounted. (The Preface to The Pleasures of Affection records two uncles with the name of Young.) His father died at Visapur in 1783 and his friend Francis William Pemberton, governor of Visapur, sent the boy to England and had his brother, Rev. Henry John Pemberton, oversee his education. He was educated at Cavendish, Suffolk, and at Berkhamsted, near Kings Langley, Herts. The deaths of the Pemberton brothers in 1793 and 1794 resulted in his being apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary and then briefly being sent out to India as a cadet. He married Elizabeth Shephard on 4 June 1801 at St. Mary’s, Lambeth. They had one daughter, Jesse Ann Turner, in 1802. In 1816 John Watkins claimed he had “married very imprudently and offended his friends.” He also noted “many trials in his own profession, and also in others, particularly that of keeping a school” and that he “was reduced to the greatest distress, from which he has been relieved by a subscription and placed in a druggist’s shop.” In Feb. 1812, writing from 11 Nelson Street, City Road, London, Turner applied to the RLF for assistance and referred to his early marriage as “premature and indiscreet.” He received three small awards (1812-17) of between £3 and 5 guineas. He died on 21 Sept. 1820, aged 39, “married man, doctor” of Lavender Place, and was buried at Holy Trinity, Clapham, Lambeth, on 25 Sept. 1820. His daughter, Jesse Ann, submitted an appeal, “A Case of Extreme Distress,” to the RLF after his death on behalf of her sick mother and herself and was awarded £5 in Jan. 1821 but her subsequent applications were refused and she married in 1822. Watkins (1816), Watt (1824), Allibone (1871), and others record an as yet unlocated early volume, The Affectionate Widow, A Poem (1807). (Copsey, 1: 494; Watkins, 356; RLF 1/277; ancestry.co.uk 10 Apr. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 10 Apr. 2023) AA
Other Names:
- C. Turner