Life
Turner was the son of James Turner, head of the Gurney and Turner's Yarmouth Bank and Elizabeth Cotman, the only daughter of the mayor of Yarmouth, John Cotman. He was educated at North Walsham Grammar School (now Paston College), Norfolk and at Barton Bendish as a pupil of the botanist Robert Forby. He then went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he left without a degree due to his father's terminal illness. In 1796 he joined his father's bank and married Mary Palgrave, the daughter of William Palgrave.
He became interested in botany and published a number of books. In December 1802 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1816, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
By 1820 his interest in botany had been replaced by an interest in antiquities. He and his children were taught drawing by renowned Norfolk artist John Sell Cotman who became a good friend. They travelled to Normandy together and collaborated on a book, Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, published in 1822, with Cotman providing the etchings.
By his first wife he was father-in-law of Sir William Jackson Hooker, FRS and of Sir Francis Palgrave, FRS and the grandfather of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, FRS and Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave, FRS. After his first wife's death in 1850 he married Rosamund Duff and moved to live in Old Brompton. He died in 1858, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.
Read more about this topic: Dawson Turner
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)