Jesse

Jesse, EDWARD, a popular writer on natural history, was born at Hutton Cranswick, Yorkshire, 14th January 1780. He became clerk in a government office, and was successively secretary to Lord Dartmouth, commissioner of hackney-coaches, and deputy surveyor-general of the royal parks and palaces. He died at Brighton, 29th March 1868. His books include Gleanings in Natural History (1832-35), An Angler's Rambles (1836), Scenes and Tales of Country Life (1844), Anecdotes of Dogs (1846), and Lectures on Natural History (1861); besides editions of Walton's Complete Angler, White's Selborne, and Ritchie's Windsor Castle. See Mrs Houstoun's Sylvanus Redivivus (Lond. 1890). —JOHN HENEAGE JESSE, son of the foregoing, was born in 1815, and at an early age filled a place in the secretary's department of the Admiralty at Whitehall. He had already written poems and plays without success, when he found his work in a series of bright and interesting works in the field of domestic history, which have yet far more than their mere readability to commend them to general readers, if not to serious students. These are Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts (1840), Memoirs of the Court of London from the Revolution of 1688 to the Death of George II. (1843), George Selwyn and his Contemporaries (1843-44), Memoirs of the Pretenders and their Adherents (1845), Richard the Third and his Contemporaries (1862), and Memoirs of the Life and Reign of King George the Third (1867), the last his best book. Other works are his Literary and Historical Memorials of London (1847); London: its Celebrated Characters and Remarkable Places (1871); and Memoirs of Celebrated Etonians (1875). He died 7th July 1874.