Author: Van Dyk, Harry Stoe
Biography:
VAN DYK, Harry Stoe (1799-1828: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 29 Mar. 1799 but baptised on 11 Nov. 1813 at St. Andrew, Holborn, London, the second son of Cornelis Van Dyk, a Dutch mariner, who had interests in the Rio Demerara region of Dutch Guyana, and his wife Anna Catharina Pieters. His father died probably sometime in 1813 in Guyana and it is unclear how much time he spent there. (Britain seized it from the Dutch in 1796, ceded it back in 1802, seized it again the following year, and was awarded it in 1814.) His will, proved on 9 Aug. 1813 with his wife as executrix, means that she baptised her son while she was living in Hatton Garden. (An elder son, George August, had been baptised 19 April 1797, at St. Mary Woolnoth, City of London.) Nothing is known of his education but in his twenties he contributed poems to the London Magazine and acquired a reputation for writing poetry set to music and sung at various venues in London. These, and his theatrical portraits in the work listed here, were fashionable and elegant but he was also instrumental in bringing Dutch poetry up to the end of the seventeenth century to the attention of a British audience when he was enlisted by John Bowring to help produce the Batavian Anthology; or, Specimens of the Dutch Poets (1824). The Gondola (1827), a series of tales after Boccaccio with some set in the West Indies where he had spent some time (though it is not known how much), was well received. He died on 5 June 1828 at College Place, Brompton, Kensington, “after an illness of some months.” He was buried at St. Mary Abbot’s, Kensington. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Sept. 2022; The Examiner 15 June 1828; MH 15 Aug. 1828; GM July 1828, 91) AA