Author: Yeman, Alexander
Biography:
YEMAN, Alexander (1777-1849: ancestry.com)
Alexander Yeman (alt. Yeaman) was born in Dundee, Scotland, on 11 May 1777, the son of John Yeaman, a gentleman’s servant, and his wife, Marjory Robertson. He attended school in Scotland. In the late 1780s or early 1790s, he moved with his parents to London, where his grandfather or great uncle, Alexander Yeaman, a tailor, and his wife, Adny Baker, already lived. On 8 Apr. 1798 at St James’s, Piccadilly, he married Rose (1780-1853), a daughter of impoverished parents, John and Susan Annell. Alexander and Rose had five children. In 1818, his eldest son, Richard, was apprenticed to a member of the London Vintner’s Company (Richard’s uncle or cousin Alexander Yeaman of Dundee was a vintner). In his only known publication, The Fisherman’s Hut … with Other Poems (pub. Feb. 1807) he sensitively, though with little skill, contemplates quintessential Romantic themes. The reviews were harsh: Oxford Review, “unreserved disapprobation;” Poetical Register, “not a single good line;” Monthly Literary Recreations, “[l]et him study grammar.” “The Nosegay,” a poem in The Fisherman’s Hut, superficially resembles aspects of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence.” During his youth, he witnessed events that he portrays in his long, two-part eponymous poem “The Fisherman’s Hut”: at the Lothian harvest, families came from up to two hundred miles to earn the pittance of a harvest fee; vast numbers of Highlanders, driven by greedy Lairds from their meagre plots of land, crowded the wharves, awaiting passage to America. He was valet to a gentleman in 1819; in 1830, he was a plumber; and from 1835 he was a porter and messenger at the department of Woods and Forests (£25 per annum). In 1823, and again in 1826, his inadequate earnings drove him with his family into the workhouse. In Oct. 1839, he petitioned the court for release from Whitecross Street debtor’s prison. Earlier, he had turned to crime. Convicted of larceny in 1811, he was imprisoned aboard the convict hulk Retribution. In Mar. 1819, he was arrested for stealing from his master. His physical appearance is recorded in a prison register: five feet four inches, dark complexion, black hair, hazel eyes, slim. Yeman died on 19 Oct. 1849 at 4 Cherries Street (alt. Chenies Street), Tottenham Court Road. (ancestry.com 11 July 2023; findmypast.com 11 July 2023; Scotlandspeople.gov.uk 11 July 2023) JC