John Wilson Croker (20 December 178010 August 1857) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and author.

Life

He was born in Galway, the only son of John Croker, the surveyor-general of customs and excise in Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1800. Immediately afterwards he entered Lincoln's Inn, and in 1802 he was called to the Irish bar.

He married Rosamond Pennell, daughter of William Pennell and Elizabeth Pennell (née Carrington))on 22 May 1806, in Waterford, Ireland.

None of his children with Rosamond Pennell survived past 3 years old. He and Rosamond adopted Rosamond's younger sister (who was the 18th child of Rosamond's parents) and she was also (confusingly) named Rosamond Hester Elizabeth Pennell. The younger Rosamond was born in January 1810 in Waterford, Ireland (christened with the surname Pennell). Sometime between birth and 1814, she became part of the Croker family. The name she was better known by was the nickname "Nony" Croker.

His interest in the French Revolution led him to collect a large number of valuable documents on the subject, which are now in the British Museum. In 1804 he published anonymously Familiar Epistles to J. F. Jones, Esquire, on the State of the Irish Stage, a series of caustic criticisms in verse on the management of the Dublin theatres. The book ran through five editions in one year. In 1807 he published a pamphlet on The State of Ireland, Past and Present, in which he advocated Catholic emancipation. The second secretary to the Admiralty John Barrow became a close personal friend, and Barrow's eldest son Sir George Barrow, 2nd Baronet married Croker's adopted daughter Nony. and, having secured a pension of £1500 a year, retired from his post at the admiralty in 1830. He was a determined opponent of the Reform Bill, and vowed that he would never sit in a reformed parliament; he left parliament when the Act was passed in 1832. Many of his political speeches were published in pamphlet form, and they show him to have been a vigorous and effective, though somewhat unscrupulous and often virulently personal, party debater. Yet he could on occasion be magnanimous to his opponents: when Lord Althorp during a debate in the Commons, said that while he had figures which refuted Croker's argument he had mislaid them, Croker replied that he would never doubt Althorp's word. Croker had been an ardent supporter of Robert Peel, but finally broke with him when he began to advocate the repeal of the Corn Laws. He was also responsible for the famous Quarterly article on John Keats's Endymion. Shelley and Byron blamed this article for bringing about the death of the poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's phrase, 'by an article' (they, however, attributed the article to William Gifford).

His magnum opus, an edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson (1831) was the subject of an unfavourable review by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review (a Whig rival/opponent of the Quarterly Review) The main grounds of criticism were echoed by Thomas Carlyle in a less famous review in Fraser's Magazine

  • that Croker had added extensive notes which were to little point, being superfluous or declaring Croker's inability to grasp Johnson's point on matters where the reviewers had no difficulty. Macaulay also complained (with numerous examples) of factual errors in the notes; Carlyle of their carping attitude to Johnson's motives (Carlyle, whose father was a stonemason, and who (like Johnson) had scraped a living as a schoolmaster, before writing encyclopedia articles for bread-and-butter wages, also took great exception to one note which took for granted that when Johnson spoke of having lived on 4½ d a day he was disclosing something of which he should have been ashamed to speak)
  • that Croker had not preserved the integrity of Boswell's text, but had interpolated text from four other accounts of Johnson (Hawkins, Mrs Thrale etc.), distinguished only from genuine Boswell by being inside brackets, so that "You begin a sentence under Boswell's guidance, thinking to be carried happily through it by the same: but no; in the middle, perhaps after your semi-colon, and some consequent 'for' – starts up one of these Bracket-ligatures, and stitches you in half a page to twenty or thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi; so that often one must make the old sad reflection, Where we are, we know; whither we are going no man knoweth"

Croker was occupied for several years on an annotated edition of Alexander Pope's works. It was left unfinished at the time of his death, but it was afterwards completed by Whitwell Elwin and William John Courthope. He died at St Albans Bank, Hampton.

Cape Croker on Ontario's Bruce Peninsula is also named after him by Henry Wolsey Bayfield.

Books and articles about Croker

References

  • Royal Memoirs on the French Revolution, (1823 English translation by Croker, 302pp., of several key eyewitness accounts)