Hawkins, Sir John(i)
- Percy A. Scholes
Extract
(b London, March 29, 1719; d London, May 21, 1789). English music historian and antiquary, author of an important early history of music.
Hawkins's father was a carpenter and a Freeman of the Haberdashers’ Company, who described himself as ‘Citizen and Haberdasher’. The family claimed descent from the Elizabethan admiral Sir John Hawkins, but are not included in the elaborate genealogical table in Mary S. Hawkins’s Plymouth Armada Heroes (Plymouth, 1888). His mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Gwatkin of Fownhope, Herefordshire. Little is known about John Hawkins’s schooling; according to Chalmers, he was sent ‘first to one school, and afterwards to a second, where he acquired a tolerable knowledge of Latin’ (the second may have been Mr Samuel Watkins’s academy in Spital Square). About 1736 he studied for a year under an architect, Edward Hoppus, and then was articled to a city attorney and solicitor, John Scott, under whom he had a hard life. Rising at four in the morning, he applied himself diligently to legal study and to the works of ‘the most celebrated authors’, becoming familiar with both law and literature, particularly poetry. In ...
