Author: Weaver, William
Biography:
WEAVER, William (1793-1826: findmypast.co.uk)
He was born on 7 Nov. 1793 and baptised on 11 Nov. at St. Wulfram’s, Grantham, Lincolnshire, the eldest child of John Weaver and Ann Tollard, who had married in the same church on 1 Jan. 1793. Nothing is known of his education except that he was apprenticed to a printer in Grantham. He went to London when he was about 21 but a coach accident in which he broke his leg forced him to return home where he worked for a few years at Drakard’s Stamford News. He enlisted as a private in the 3rd Regiment of footguards but was ill-suited to military life, served terms of confinement, and was eventually discharged. Thereafter he worked in Nottingham and Grantham as a journeyman printer and sometime writer, schoolmaster, and attorney’s clerk. In 1819 he was fined five shillings for several incidents at “The Temple of Wisdom,” the home of an impostor, Dr. John Perkins, self-styled Grand Ambassador of Heaven, whom he had previously satirised. He married Martha Hill on 11 May 1813 at St. Wulfram’s, Grantham. They had two daughters and a son. His death notice recorded “his high taste for the romance of poetry, his admiration of the unfortunate Chatterton, whose fate was melancholy music to his mind,” his own “aberrations attendant upon genius,” and a life led by “Imprudence his goddess, with Poverty in train.” On the evening of 10 Feb. 1826 he took a “large quantity of extract of henbane and the deadly nightshade,” and despite swift medical intervention died in the early morning of 11 Feb., leaving a widow and three children. He left his wife a note which read, “If thou hast the opportunity, marry again--seek in the arms of another that peace I have torn from you.” (She did not remarry and died in Grantham in 1842, aged 60.) An inquest recorded a verdict of insanity. He may have contributed poems to local newspapers but his only known work, Melancholy Effusions (1817), published while he was in the army, exists in a unique uncut copy at the British Library and ominously contains a long poem, “Bethlehem Hospital.” (findmypast.co.uk 19 Oct. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 19 Oct. 2023; Drakard’s Stamford News 14 May 1813, 17 Feb. 1826; MH 6 Nov. 1819, 16 Feb. 1826; Lincolnshire Chronicle 11 Feb. 1842) AA
Other Names:
- W. Weaver