Author: Turner, Sharon
Biography:
TURNER, Sharon (1768-1847: ODNB)
He was born in Pentonville, Middlesex, on 4 Sept. 1768 to William Turner and his wife Ann Gopp. (ODNB says his parents moved to London from Yorkshire on their marriage but they were married at Saint Giles, Cripplegate, and both may have been born in London.) William Turner is identified as a grocer on his son’s baptism record and his articles of clerkship. Sharon Turner was educated at the Clerkenwell academy of Dr. James Davis and in 1782 was articled as a clerk to Thomas Kennedy, an attorney with offices in the Temple. Kennedy died in 1788 and, despite his youth, Turner successfully took over his practice. In 1795 he married Mary Watts, daughter of a line-engraver; they had five children who survived their father. They lived in Red Lion Square, Holborn, in easy reach of the British Museum where Turner developed his interests in Old Norse literature and, increasingly, Anglo-Saxon history. His four-volume History of the Anglo-Saxons was published 1799-1804 and made his name as the foremost historian on the subject. In 1800 he was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. As a lawyer, he became an authority on copyright, a contentious issue at the time, and his practice flourished until his retirement (probably because of his ill-health) in 1829. Although nothing equalled his Anglo-Saxon history, he wrote prolifically on a range of topics until late in life. In 1845, at the age of seventy-seven, he published an epic, Richard the Third: A Poem; the preface states that the idea of Richard being unfairly treated by history had first come to him over five decades earlier. Mary Turner died in Nov. 1843 when they were living in a cottage at Winchcombe Hill; his elaborate will, written after her death, makes clear the depth of his sense of loss. He died on 13 Feb. 1847 at Winchcombe Hill (not Red Lion Square as given in the ODNB) and was interred with Mary in a family grave in Norwood Churchyard. (ODNB 3 Dec. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 3 Dec. 2020; 23 Dec. 2024) SR