members of his family had disowned him when he took to the stage. He then acted at Richmond, where he brought out his ‘Linda and Clara, or the British Officer,’ a comedy in three acts, subsequently enlarged to five, and published London, 1791, 8vo. He devoted himself in London to literary and scientific schemes. A trip to Paris in 1791 led to the publication of ‘A Review of the Proceedings at Paris during the last Summer,’ London, n.d. [1792]. He refers to a play entitled a ‘Picture of Paris,’ which was acted once. Of this no trace is discoverable. He had reappeared at Covent Garden 16 Oct. 1790 as Othello, and played there in the following season. In 1792 he married Miss H. B. Porter, third daughter of Dr. Porter. Soon afterwards (1793) he accepted an offer from Wignell, manager of the Philadelphia Theatre, and started for America. Between 1797 and 1806 he acted at many theatres in New York, Boston, and elsewhere without establishing a position. He gave readings and recitations at College Hall, Philadelphia, and for a time kept an academy at Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1814 he established salt-works near New London, Connecticut, and sometimes, in intervals of other occupations, resorted to manual labour for bread. He also tried to establish in Philadelphia a school similar to Eton or Westminster. He wrote some verse epistles, one of them printed, and composed an ‘Apology’ for his life, Philadelphia, 1814. In a pitiable preface to this he represents himself struggling with want, and dedicates it to Mimosa Sensitiva, apparently his wife, of whom and his ‘drooping family’ he speaks. Dunlap in his ‘History of the American Theatres,’ pp. 231–3, and elsewhere, says he was a remarkably handsome man, over six feet in height, with light complexion and hair, and light grey eyes. Dunlap declares that he never paid his bills in Paris or Philadelphia, that he lived by fraud, and passed his life between a palace and a prison. He had been in 1794 the idol of the literary youth of Philadelphia. In 1815, at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, he was allowed to attempt Lear, but his memory was gone. He died 14 June 1816. The picture affixed to his ‘Apology’ shows a handsome but rather narrow head. Wherever he went he made friends. In Edinburgh, Home, the author of ‘Douglas,’ Mackenzie, of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ and other literary men consorted with him. He resided some time with James Bruce, the African traveller, and claims to have assisted him in his ‘Travels.’
[An Apology for the Life of James Fennell, written by himself, Philadelphia, 1814. A statement of facts occasional of and relative to the late disturbances at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, by James Fennell, Edinburgh, 8vo, n.d. [1788]; Jackson's Hist. of the Scottish Stage, 1793; Dunlap's Hist. of the American Theatre, London, 8vo, n.d.; Genest's Account of the English Stage; Baker, Reed, and Jones's Biographia Dramatica; Secret Hist. of the Green Room, 1795, attributed to Hazlewood; Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography.]
FENNELL, JOHN GREVILLE (1807–1885), artist, naturalist, and angler, was born at sea between Ireland and England in 1807. He began his career as an artist by winning the silver medal offered by the Duke of Sussex for a drawing of Hercules, and afterwards was a student at Finden's house, where he was intimate with Hablot K. Browne [q. v.], who was similarly employed. As a young man Fennell succeeded best in comic painting, but later in life was fonder of landscapes. In some of these, however, he was very careless, and was always unequal in his work. He drew pictures of the tournament at Eglinton Castle for the ‘Illustrated London News.’ His fondness for natural history displayed itself chiefly in observations on the habits of fish and waterside birds. These he carried on simultaneously with the practice of angling, of which he was a devoted follower, especially in the Thames. He was a member of the ‘Field’ staff from the commencement of that paper in 1853, and wrote week after week in it on fishing subjects; besides which he was a frequent contributor to the ‘Fishing Gazette’ and other sporting papers on angling and outdoor pursuits. He was author of ‘The Book of the Roach,’ 1870, an exhaustive treatise on angling for that fish; and contributed a paper called ‘Curiosities of Angling Literature’ to Mr. Cholmondeley Pennell's ‘Fishing Gossip,’ 1866. This is a discursive attempt at the humorous style in writing on angling topics, which was at that time fashionable. He also wrote ‘The Rail and the Rod,’ a meritorious guide-book to the favourite angling resorts of the Thames. Generous to a fault, and an excellent practical angler, Fennell was never so happy as when relating to a circle of friends reminiscences of Dickens, Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold, Mackay, and Harrison Ainsworth, with all of whom he had been on intimate terms. He lived long at Barnes, and late in life at Henley, at both of which places he was favourably situated for the pursuit of angling. At the latter town he died suddenly on 13 Jan. 1885, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, and was buried in Trinity churchyard, not a hundred yards from the house in which he spent his last two years, under the appropriate epitaph, ‘The fishers also
