Author: Wyatt, T.
Biography:
WYATT, T. (fl 1818)
Elegiac Sonnets (1818), published by subscription with a modest list of names headed by the Duke of Gloucester, was (according to the preface) the author’s second venture in this method of publication, but Wyatt does not identify the earlier work by title and no trace of it has been located. The poetry is conventional and seems to be the work of a young man, not a woman: a birthday ode to the late Princess Charlotte, celebrations of friendship, love stories, reflections on melancholy, etc. One personal exception is a tribute to a friend, Lieut. W----, who died in the Battle of Bergen-op-Zoom (1814). The subscription list is exceptionally narrow in its geographic range, most subscribers being from villages in Berkshire or close by in Oxfordshire—and a substantial proportion of them from Englefield, where all the gentry seem to have taken copies. None of them are Wyatts. It is possible that the author was Thomas Wyatt of Banbury, Oxfordshire (1797-1853), later Vicar of Wroxton and Balscot. He was a student at Eton (in Berkshire) and then at Oxford from 1815 to 1819--and yet there are no classical allusions and no hints of student life in the poems, nor claims to academic credentials on the title-page. No other convincing candidates present themselves, however. Wyatt does not appear to have written anything more. (ancestry.com 26 July 2024; findmypast.com 26 July 2024; H. E. C. Stapylton, Eton School Lists from 1791 to 1850 [1864], 87; Alumni Oxonienses; CCEd 26 July 2024) HJ