Atherstone, Edwin

(1788-1872)

   The DNB says that Atherstone was a "voluminous writer in verse and prose." Born in Nottingham to a working family, the thirteenth of fifteen children, he was educated at Fulneck Moravian School in Yorkshire. He taught music at a Franciscan school in Taunton and later moved from Bath to London, where he dealt in and collected paintings, running two art galleries. In addition to poems he wrote several plays. His published poems: The Last Days of Herculaneum, 1821. Abradates and Panthea, 1821. Midsummer Day's Dream, 1824. The Fall of Nineveh, 1868 (thirty books). The Sea-Kings in England, 1830 (an epic poem dealing with the times of Alfred the Great). The Handwriting on the Wall, 1858. Israel in Eg ypt, 1861 (a poem of nearly twenty thousand lines).

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Life and Work of Edwin Atherstone: The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska (http://www.unl.edu/Corvey/html/Projects/Corvey%20Poets/PoetsIndex.htm).