John Bicknell

John Bicknell, the elder (baptised 1746 – 1787), was an English barrister and writer. He was co-author with Thomas Day of the abolitionist poem The Dying Negro from 1773.[1] Bicknell has also been credited with Musical Travels through England, a pseudonymous satire on Charles Burney.[2]

For the English author, see John Laurens Bicknell.

Life

The second son of Robert Bicknell of the Inner Temple, he was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1761. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1769.[3][4]

Thomas Day was a friend from their time at Charterhouse School.[5] Bicknell participated in the late 1760s in the initial stage of Day's plan to train a suitable wife from himself, at Shrewsbury orphanage.[6]

Bicknell befriended John Laurens, then a law student in London of his brother Charles Bicknell, around 1774.[7][8] Considered a rake, his attitude to his legal career was negligent, and he spent time on writing.[9] He was a commissioner of bankruptcy.[10]

Bicknell died on 27 April 1787.[11]

Works

The Dying Negro (1773) is thought to have originated in a draft by Bicknell, then passed to Day who worked it up for publication.[12]

Some of his contemporaries credited Bicknell with the Musical Travels published in 1774 under the pseudonym "Joel Collier".[11] This attribution is also accepted by modern scholars, and was supported soon after Bicknell's death, by William Seward, who knew Bicknell and introduced James Boswell to him, in 1786. It was also endorsed by Francis Douce and John Thomas Smith.[13] Seward also identified a number of short satirical pieces in newspapers, that had been attributed to George Steevens, to Bicknell.[14]

Family

Bicknell on 16 April 1784 married, at St Philip's Church, Birmingham, Sabrina Sidney, the girl he had selected with Thomas Day at Shrewsbury about 15 years earlier. She had spent some time living with Bicknell's mother. After Day dropped his plan to marry her, she had remained a ward of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and lived in the West Midlands.[15][16]

After Bicknell's death she became housekeeper and manager for Charles Burney the younger, a schoolfellow of her late husband at Charterhouse.[15][17] There were two sons of the marriage, John Laurens Bicknell and Henry Edgeworth Bicknell, young boys on their father's death. Sabrina as widow had financial support from Day and Edgeworth, and George Hardinge and Anna Seward organised collections for her.[18][19] John Laurens Bicknell, educated at Burney's school, became a solicitor and Fellow of the Royal Society.[20]

Charles Bicknell, John's younger brother and solicitor to the Admiralty and the Prince Regent, became father-in-law to John Constable. His eldest daughter Maria Elizabeth Bicknell married Constable in 1816.[21]

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Notes
  1. Michael J. Franklin (22 September 2011). 'Orientalist Jones': Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794. OUP Oxford. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-19-953200-1.
  2. "collections.soane.org, Musical travels through England. By the late Joel Collier, licentiate in music.". Retrieved 27 May 2016.
  3. Lincoln's Inn (London, England); William Paley Baildon (1896). The Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn. Lincoln's Inn. p. 464.
  4. John Constable; Suffolk Records Society (1962). John Constable's Correspondence: The Fishers. Suffolk Records Society. p. 40.
  5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (24 November 1997). Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Duke University Press. p. 222 note 10. ISBN 978-0-8223-8247-8.
  6. Hugh Cunningham (2006). The Invention of Childhood. BBC Books. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-563-49390-7.
  7. Gregory D. Massey, The Limits of Antislavery Thought in the Revolutionary Lower South: John Laurens and Henry Laurens, The Journal of Southern History Vol. 63, No. 3 (Aug., 1997), pp. 495–530, at p. 502. Published by: Southern Historical Association. DOI: 10.2307/2211648 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2211648
  8. Simon Schama (31 August 2010). Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. Random House. p. 77. ISBN 978-1-4090-1862-9.
  9. Martin Gayford (25 February 2009). Constable In Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter. Penguin Books Limited. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-14-191267-7.
  10. The Royal Kalendar and Court and City Register for England, Scotland, Ireland and the Colonies: For the Year 1779. 1779. pp. 99–.
  11. The European Magazine: And London Review. Philological Society of London. 1787. p. 296.
  12. Philip Gould (30 June 2009). Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Harvard University Press. p. 227 note 89. ISBN 978-0-674-03785-4.
  13. James Marshall Osborn; René Wellek; Álvaro Ribeiro (1979). Evidence in Literary Scholarship: essays in memory of James Marshall Osborn. Clarendon Press. pp. 292–3. ISBN 978-0-19-812612-6.
  14. James Marshall Osborn; René Wellek; Álvaro Ribeiro (1979). Evidence in Literary Scholarship: essays in memory of James Marshall Osborn. Clarendon Press. pp. 297 note 41. ISBN 978-0-19-812612-6.
  15. Edward Alan Bloom; Lillian Doris Bloom (1996). The Piozzi Letters: 1805–1810. University of Delaware Press. p. 298 note 7. ISBN 978-0-87413-393-6.
  16. Martin Gayford (25 February 2009). Constable In Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter. Penguin Books Limited. pp. 41–2. ISBN 978-0-14-191267-7.
  17. Martin Gayford (25 February 2009). Constable In Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter. Penguin Books Limited. p. 297. ISBN 978-0-14-191267-7.
  18. Desmond Clarke (1965). The Ingenious Mr. Edgeworth. Oldbourne. p. 88.
  19. Paula R. Backscheider (16 September 2002). Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement. Taylor & Francis. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-8018-7095-8.
  20. James Marshall Osborn; René Wellek; Álvaro Ribeiro (1979). Evidence in literary scholarship: essays in memory of James Marshall Osborn. Clarendon Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-0-19-812612-6.
  21. Ivy, Judy Crosby. "Constable, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/6107. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
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