Author: Wawn, Charles Newby
Biography:
WAWN, Charles Newby (1782-1840: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 17 Feb. 1782 and baptised on 27 Feb. at Bishopwearmouth (now a district of modern-day Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, North-East England), one of seven children of George Wawn and Isabella Newby, who had married in 1766. He was apprenticed to a barber/surgeon in 1796 and would go on to practise as a surgeon and dentist listed in various directories from 1811 onward. He learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and several modern languages. He early embraced Methodism and was active in the formation of the Newcastle Bible and Tract Societies; the Sunday School Union; and the Auxiliary Church, Methodist Missionary, and Jewish Missionary Societies. He was also a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to which he was a regular contributor. Like many religious men he was drawn into the 1819 Don Juan controversy in which Byron’s poetic power seemed to endanger morality and had to be condemned. He acknowledged Byron as “kin of Angel-kind, Whose magic Lyre my soul has wrapt” but could not reconcile himself to Byron’s immorality (“Inscription Attach’d to a Portrait of Lord Byron,” Poetic Sketches [1825], 21). He wrote a number of papers under the signature “Eleutheros” in support of the abolition of colonial slavery and raised objections to Lord’s Stowell’s judgment that Grace James, a former slave, could revert to slavery on return to another jurisdiction (Antigua). Wawn appears not to have married. He retired to Tynemouth in 1838 and died there on 22 May 1840, aged 58. (ancestry.co.uk 28 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 28 June 2023; Newcastle Courant 29 May 1840; James Fenwick, Obituary of Charles Newby Wawn, Esq., [1840], reprinted from Newcastle Chronicle 30 May 1840, with a portrait and further communications to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; David Stewart, “The End of the Conversation: Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ at the Newcastle Lit & Phil,” Review of English Studies Apr. 2015, 322-41) AA
Other Names:
- Wawn, C. N.