Author: Wright, George
Biography:
WRIGHT, George (fl 1770-95)
Pseudonym Bob Short
For an author who wrote as much as Wright did, it is remarkable how little information is available in the public record. From 1770 to 1785 he was a prodigious contributor to periodicals and magazines and a regular hack writer or editor for London publishers. But his name was so common that it is not yet possible to be sure of his identity. Luckily there is a marriage record, with baptisms to follow, and Wright himself provided a sketchy autobiography in some of his publications. Pitcher’s PBSA article untangles most of the complexities of his many contributions to magazines, and concludes that he used the pseudonym “Bob Short, Junior” for a time because he himself was George Wright, Junior. He was certainly a Londoner by birth. His essays and editions (Thomson, Blair, Gray) are sometimes dated from London addresses—Finchley, Hatton Garden, Hampstead. He may have been the George Wright baptised at Finsbury on 4 June 1738, son of George and Ann Wright—who might be the couple married in 1736, in which case her birth name was Gamble. Nothing is known of his education but he quotes Latin easily and is invariably cited as “Esq.” The story he himself tells is of a gentleman of independent fortune who takes pleasure in literature, country walks, and the exercise of benevolence: a fantasy? In 1778 he revealed that about 1773 he had married “a young lady of family and fortune” who shares his love of rural retirement and with him has a growing family. Pitcher located a magazine announcement (confirmed) of the marriage of George Wright, Junior, of Hatton Garden, to a Miss Wright of Hackney in 1772, but no matching public record has been found. There is also a documented marriage between George Wright and Ann Sexton, both of Finsbury, on 16 May 1773; that couple went on to have at least six children baptised in Finsbury or Stepney. Wright made his name with The Rural Christian and capitalized on it with other “rural,” pious, and didactic titles and collections of prose and verse, some original and some effectively anthologies. Pitcher sums him up as a “semiprofessional compiler.” He went silent after 1795 and presumably died about then. (Edward W. Pitcher, “The Periodical and Miscellaneous Publications of George Wright [‘Bob Short, Junior’],” PBSA 74 [1980], 379-83; findmypast.com 23 July 2024) HJ
Other Names:
- G. W.
- G. Wright