Author: Woty, William
Biography:
WOTY, William (1732-91: ODNB)
Pseudonym J. Copywell, of Lincoln’s Inn
Woty was baptised at Alton, Hampshire, on 20 Oct. 1732, the son of Elizabeth (Hawkins) and William Woty, who had married on 22 Sept. 1831. He had a good classical education, probably at Alton: in one of his early publications there is an elegy for his schoolmaster. He was destined for the law, and it was while he was a law clerk in London that he started sending poems to the newspapers. One poem, “The Spouting-Club,” was pirated in 1758 but he reclaimed it and included it in his first, pseudonymous collection, Shrubs of Parnassus (1760), which appeared with a long subscribers’ list that included Samuel Johnson (1709-84, q.v.). Johnson subscribed also to Woty’s Poetical Works (1770) and was one of the authors included in the twelve volumes of the Poetical Calendar edited by Woty and Francis Fawkes in 1763. Woty was soon able to leave clerking and publish under his own name. About 1767 he accepted a position as secretary and legal advisor to Washington Shirley, Vice-Admiral and 5th Earl Ferrers (1722-78), whose family seat—which he was in the process of rebuilding—was Staunton Harold near Loughborough, Leicestershire, on the border with Derbyshire. He became Ferrers’s “companion and confidential friend” (Stamford Mercury); dedicated the 1770 Works to him; and appears to have stayed on at Staunton after the Earl died, leaving him an annuity of £150 that guaranteed his financial security. His final work, Poetical Amusements (1789), is dedicated to Robert, the 7th Earl. At St. Marylebone, London, on 25 Aug.1777 Woty married Charlotte Thompson. The marriage appears to have been childless. Woty died on 5 Mar. 1791, according to GM’s correction of earlier reports, and was buried at All Saints, Loughborough, on 17 Mar. His widow Charlotte was buried at the same church on 5 Aug. 1792. (ODNB 21 July 2024; findmypast.com 21 July 2024; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 21 Mar. 1791; Stamford Mercury 25 Mar. 1791; GM Apr. 1791, 379) HJ
Other Names:
- W. Woty