Author: Wilde, Joseph
Biography:
WILDE, Joseph (b c. 1730 d 1825: Lattimore)
The poet’s birthdate, origins, and parentage, are unknown. According to Margaret Lattimore in her 1982 doctoral thesis, he was in his 80s when in 1813 he was appointed librarian of the newly established Plymouth Public Library. He retired sometime after 1823. Lattimore states that he died in 1825, but there is no mention of him in her source, the Exeter Flying Post for 29 Dec. 1825. A writer in 1833 refers to him as the “late librarian.” Probably he hailed from Sheffield. Many of the 750 or so subscribers to his poem The Hospital are from there; two of them, George Wilde and William Wilde (each purchased twelve copies), are undoubtedly his relations. Many of his subscribers are notables associated with theatres at Canterbury, Sunderland, Plymouth Dock, and Exeter, and with the Royal Theatres at Bath, Norwich, Covent Garaden, and Edinburgh. He was himself a player, a comedian, a member with his wife of the Plymouth Dock, the Norwich, and other provincial theatres. His wife’s forename and her surname at birth are unknown; she died at Plymouth in 1818. Benefits were performed for “Mr Wilde” at the Canterbury Theatre on 13 May 1788, 8 Mar. 1791, and 25 Mar. 1794, and for “Mrs. Wilde” on 30 May 1789 at Faversham, on 10 May 1788 and 29 Apr. 1790 at Canterbury, and on 14 July 1804 at Peterborough. Probably he is the “Mr. Wilde, a respectable low comedian” who with his wife performed at the Lincoln Theatre in 1803. They were “old favourites” of “R.T.B.,” the Monthly Mirror’s provincial theatre critic. The actor Robert Dyer (whom Wilde praised in The Hospital) thought him undistinguished as a comedian but as a man honest and highly intelligent. Nicholas Toms Carrington enlisted him to revise, correct, and finish Edward Hampden Rose’s (qq.v.) semi-autobiographical novel, The Sea-Devil (1811, 1818). Page 173 forward in volume one of the novel and all of volume two are his. The poet subscribed to Carrington’s The Banks of the Tamar. (Monthly Mirror 16 [1803], 279; Devonshire Adventurer 1 [1814], 170; Exeter Flying Post, 21 Dec. 1818; Bath Journal, 15 Jan. 1821; R. Dyer, Nine Years of an Actor’s Life [1833], 221; J. Kitto, Essays and Letters [1825], 41; M. I. Lattimore, The History of Libraries in Plymouth to 1914, University of London Doctoral Thesis [1982], 160, 264 notes 214, 215; EN2) JC