Jennings, James (1772–1833)

Writer. Born in Huntspill, Somerset, son of a village shopkeeper, John Jennings, and his wife Elizabeth Fear. Educated locally and at North Petherton School. Apprenticed to a Bristol apothecary in 1786. He contributed poems to the European Magazine and in 1794 published The Times, a satire. Jennings moved to London shortly after his marriage to Charlotte Sawier, probably the only daughter of Southey’s landlady Mary Sawier, in 1795.

King, John [Nicholas Johann Koenig] (1766–1846)

John King [Nicholas Johann Koenig] (1766–1846): Bristol-based surgeon, painter and linguist, originally from Berne, Switzerland. He came to England in the 1790s and studied medicine under John Abernethy (1764–1831; DNB) at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, before settling at Clifton in Bristol. He married Emmeline Edgeworth, a sister of the novelist Maria (1768–1849; DNB). Southey came to know King well when he succeeded Davy in his role at the Pneumatic Institution in 1801.

Kelly, Thomas W. (b. c. 1800)

Thomas W. Kelly (b. c. 1800): Poet, born in London of Irish parentage. His works included Myrtle Leaves; A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Amatory (1824). He briefly corresponded with Southey in 1827 after he found one of the latter’s manuscript letters to a friend, now deceased, in a book he had purchased. He offered to return it, but Southey told him to keep the letter, on the condition that it was not published during his lifetime.

Kenyon, John (1784–1856)

John Kenyon (1784–1856): Kenyon was a very wealthy man. On the death of his father, John Kennion (d. c. 1792), he inherited a share in the sugar-producing estate of Chester in Trelawny, Jamaica, and the two hundred enslaved persons who worked the estate. Though he was born in the West Indies he left as a child and was educated at Charterhouse and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He lived mostly in the West Country and then London, though he also travelled a great deal. Kenyon’s first wife, Susannah Wright, died in Naples in 1818 and he married Caroline Curties (d. 1835) in 1821.