Author: Wade, Thomas
Biography:
WADE, Thomas (1805-1875: ODNB)
Wade was born in Aug. 1805 at Walworth, near London (not Woodbridge, Suffolk, as in other sources), a son of Searles Wade (1766-1818) and his second wife, Laura Carthew (1779-1861). He had a brother, William (1807-1883). Among his five stepsiblings were Charles Henry (1795 1843) and Robert (1797-1872). A notable surgeon, Robert was a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1831, Charles sued Thomas for absconding with £7,000. In 1804, his father dissolved his partnership in a Woodbridge brewing and liquor merchant business. Upon his bankruptcy in 1805, he moved his family from Ipswich to Albion Street, Blackfriars. Nothing is known of Wade’s education. Patronized by actors Charles and Fanny Kemble, he authored several Covent Garden plays and, with William Macready, collaborated on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III that was never performed. Wade briefly edited Bell’s Weekly Messenger and, for several years, the British Press. The poems he contributed to the Monthly Repository are collected in Mundi et Cordis (1835). Leigh Hunt (q.v.) thought his poetry “overflowing with fancy and susceptibility, and not without the finest subtleties of imagination”. Robert Keeley, George Toynbee, and Barry Cornwall were among his friends. At St Helier, Jersey, on 22 Aug. 1840, he married Susanna Lucy (1801-1882), with whom he had already had a child, William Toynbee Wade (1839-1881). A daughter of John Eager and his wife, Charlotte Barnby, of Great Yarmouth (divorced 1838), Lucy (Wade’s preferred name for her) was the widow of Thomas Bridgman (b 1799, drowned 1836). Bridgman’s poem “The Three Dogs” was the first work illustrated by Edwin Landseer. Wade helped raise Lucy’s two children by her first marriage, John Eager (b 1825, suicide 1852), and Frederick William (1833-1892). Frederick was, like his mother and grandfather, a teacher of music. According to their marriage record, Lucy was Wade’s second wife; the identity of his first wife is unknown. Wade died at Jersey on 19 Sept 1875, his death record states at age 69 years, 1 month (therefore, b 1806), but English census records (1841-71) indicate he was born 1805. Probate valued his estate at £326 17s 7d. (ODNB 23 Apr. 2023; ancestry.com 23 Apr. 2023; J. B. Moore, Reports of Cases [1831], 12: 191-200; S. Wade, Wade Genealogy [1900], 213-16; J. L. McLean, Poems and Plays of Thomas Wade [1997]) JC