Author: Wilkinson, Henry
Biography:
WILKINSON, Henry (c. 1775-1824: findmypast.com)
Henry Wilkinson was a lawyer living in Stonegate, York, Yorkshire, when he published the first part of his poem Cain as an alternative to that of Byron (q.v.) which had appeared in 1822, and in a very circumstantial preface he was at pains to prove that he had begun and largely completed his version over thirty years earlier, and that it owed nothing to Byron’s controversial work. Wilkinson had hoped to engage Byron in debate about their opposing views but his work was delayed in the press and Byron died a month before he (Wilkinson) dated his preface on 17 May 1824. The story that he tells about the origin of his poem reveals something about his private life. He was the son of a former “confidential servant” of Lord Lyttelton (Thomas Lyttelton, 2nd Baron, of Hagley, 1744-79, q.v.), perhaps therefore the son of John and Elizabeth Wilkinson baptised in Gloucestershire on 10 June 1774. Excited by his reading of Gessner’s (q.v.) Death of Abel as a boy, he had begun an epic poem as a sequel and made revisions to it as late as 1793-4, but was discouraged from the project by his father, and gave it up. He trained as an attorney in York, following in the footsteps of another member of the family. When he recited a portion of his poem to two “young Gentlemen” of York, they encouraged him to complete it and told him about Byron’s recent treatment of the same subject. Shocked when he read it, he included a critique of Byron’s style as well as of his deist principles, announced a “new system” of versification, and included a few lines from Part Two as a sample to show that there was more to come. But Wilkinson himself died, unmarried, aged 49, and was buried at St. Michael le Belfrey, York, on 7 Nov. 1824. (findmypast.com 10 June 2024; ancestry.com 10 June 2024; Henry Wilkinson, “Preface,” Cain . . . Part 1 [1824]) HJ