Henry Quick

Henry Quick (1792–1857), the Cornish poet, was born on 4 December 1792 at Zennor, where he spent his life.

He was of humble parentage, his father Henry and his mother Margery George earned a meagre income from spinning and a small leasehold.[1] Quick began composing 'rugged verses for the countryside' in his youth. He increased a precarious income by the sale of popular journals, which he procured each month from Penzance. From 1830 until his death he commemorated in verse all the local calamities and crimes, usually closing each poem with a religious exhortation. Most of his meditations he printed as broadsides. In 1836 he wrote his Life and Progress in eighty-nine verses. He also printed A new Copy, &c., on the Glorious Coronation of Queen Victoria (1838); A new Copy of Verses on the Scarcity of the Present Season and Dreadful Famine in Ireland (1848); and similar trifles both in verse and prose.[2]

An engraving represents Quick in curious costume, with a printed sheet in his hand and a basket under his arm (Millett, Penzance Past and Present, p. 36). He died at Mill Hill Down, Zennor, on 9 Oct. 1857.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Smelt, Maurice (2006). "Henry Quick". 101 Cornish lives. Penzance, Cornwall: Alison Hodge. p. 193. ISBN 0-906720-50-8.
  2. 1 2  Norgate, Gerald le Grys (1896). "Quick, Henry". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography. 47. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Quick, Henry". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 

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