Author: Wheelwright, C. A.
Biography:
WHEELWRIGHT, C. A. (1787-1858: ancestry.co.uk)
Charles Apthorp Wheelwright was born on 24 June 1787 and baptised on 24 July at St. Mary, Stoke Newington, London, the eldest son of Charles Apthorp Wheelwight (1758-1816), an Islington wine and liquor merchant, and his wife Catherine Apthorp (1761-1842), who had married at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in 1783. His father went bankrupt in 1811 and died in 1816, leaving him a set of Boydell’s Shakespeare prints. He went to Reading Grammar School under Richard Valpy (q.v.) and proceeded to Trinity College Cambridge in 1804 (matric. 1805, Scholar 1805, BA 1809, MA 1812). He was ordained deacon in 1810. He married Anna Hubbard (1789-1858) on 5 June 1811 at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. They went on to have seven children. Members of her family had subscribed to Poems, Original and Translated (1810), which consisted mostly of translations from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, but also included an “Ode to Horror” and an “Ode to November.” He later produced translations of Pindar (1830) and Aristophanes (1837). He was Vicar of Castle Bytham and Rector of Little Bytham, Lincolnshire; Rector of Tansor, Northamptonshire; and Chaplain to Dowager Lady Ilford (1811-58). He also became a Prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral. He was gifted the livings of Castle and Little Bytham by his wife’s uncle, Bishop Tomline. They carried a salary of £700 a year out of which he paid a curate £90 to perform his duties. In 1854 someone calculated that he had received £31,500, equivalent to £10,500 a sermon, whereas the curate had received 11s 6d. He died on 20 Nov. 1858 at Tansor and was buried there, leaving an unadministered estate of under £4000 subsequently reduced to less than £200 in 1878. (ancestry.co.uk 8 Aug. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 8 Aug. 2022; CCEd 8 Aug. 2022; Ipswich Journal 8 June 1811; Sheffield Independent1 18 Dec. 1858; NPC 22 Jan. 1859, 18 July 1878; Stamford Mercury 13 Jan. 1854) AA