Richard Sharp (politician) - Biography

Biography

Until the age of 13/14, Richard Sharp was educated at Thaxted, Essex, by the Rev. John Fell, a Dissenting minister, and a friendship sprang up between the two which lasted until Fell's death. At the age of 24, Sharp wrote the "Preface" to Fell's influential book, An Essay towards an English Grammar (1784), a work which is still acknowledged and quoted to this day. Graduating from Fell's care, Sharp returned to the family home/business at 6 Fish Street Hill to begin a 7-year apprenticeship to become a master hatter. In this role he excelled, not only rescuing the business from imminent commercial failure but gradually developing his exceptional erudition and powers of conversation in such a way as to enable him to rise from the humble ranks of hatter to reach celebrity status in several different spheres of life. A commentator described Sharp at about the age of thirty as,

...already a figure in society, where his great conversational powers and his unbounded goodness of heart made him universally welcome. His judgement was trusted by all who knew him, and in later years statesmen went to him for counsel and advice. It would scarcely be too much to say that he was the most popular man in London society in his time.

Sharp thought seriously about joining the legal profession and he was admitted to the Inner Temple on 24 January 1786. It seems however that his strict moral conscience could not be reconciled with the prospect of having to defend a guilty man, and in the end he was not called to the Bar. In 1798 he finally retired from the hatter's business and joined a firm of West India merchants run by his friend Samuel Boddington in Mark Lane, a third partner later becoming Sir George Philips. Sharp made so much money as a merchant, and through his investments and banking connections, that he eventually left an incredible £250,000 in his Will. He was once described as being ‘one of the most considerable merchants in London’ and his acquired knowledge of the shipping business enabled him to give crucial support and advice to Samuel Coleridge in 1804 when the poet was about to leave England for health reasons. Indeed, as a respected London critic, Sharp gave important assistance and encouragement to both Coleridge and Wordsworth, among many others, and although much of their correspondence with Sharp has been sold overseas, some may still be seen within the poets' collected works.