Author: White, William Charles
Biography:
WHITE, William Charles (1777-1818: ancestry.com)
He was named William after his father William White, a Boston merchant, but added the name Charles to differentiate himself when he chose a career path against the wishes of his parents. The son of William and Mary (Chandler) White, he had what was described as a "genteel" education and was apprenticed to a goods importer, but as a stagestruck teenager he first went on the stage himself with some success but then, as critics cooled, fell back on writing for the stage as a sideline to his work as a lawyer. He wrote only one verse tragedy, Orlando, but later added The Clergyman's Daughter (1810, prose) and The Poor Lodger (1811, comedy). His friend Thomas--later, Robert Treat--Paine (q.v.) contributed a prologue for the first and an epilogue for the second. In 1800 he established a law practice in Rutland VT and married the daughter of a farmer; her name is not certain but she might have been Tamar Smith, married to a man of this name in Rutland in 1805. By 1811 he had settled in Worcester MA and was appointed Commonwealth Attorney for Worcester County. He engaged briefly in Republican politics as the editor of the National Aegis in 1812-13. His first wife must have died, for he made a second marriage, to Susanna Johonet Monroe, in Sutton MA in 1814. He died in Worcester after "a long and distressing illness" (dropsy according to one record), leaving a widow and "heirs"--presumably children, but the number is not known. (ancestry.com 1 Feb. 2021; Lewis Leary, "William Charles White: 'The American Garrick,'" Early American Literature 18:1 [1983] 84-94; findmypast.com 1 Feb. 2021; Appleton; Hampshire Gazette 13 May 1818) HJ