Charles Jenner

Charles Jenner (1736–1774) was an English poet, novelist and Anglican cleric.

Origins Charles Jenner was the eldest son of Charles Jenner, DD (1707–1770), and Mary his wife, daughter of John Sawyer of Heywood, Berkshire. His father, a grandson of Sir Thomas Jenner, Baron of the Exchequer, was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford (BA 1727, MA 1730, and BD and DD 1743), and became rector of Buckworth, Huntingdonshire, in 1740; chaplain to George II in 1746; prebendary of Lincoln in 1753; and archdeacon of Bedford in 1756, and of Huntingdon in 1757. Finances were always a problem, and pecuniary embarrassments ultimately forced him to leave the country. The fault was seemingly his own, since he "ran into debt with everyone; … and, at last … was forced to leave England". He died at St. Omer on 2 February 1770. He published a single sermon in 1753. A portrait came into the possession of his great-grandson, Herbert Jenner-Fust, Esq., LL.D, of Hill Court, Gloucestershire.

Life

Charles Jenner was baptised at St. Clement Danes, London, on 1 May 1736. He was admitted as a pensioner at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, on 14 April 1753, graduating BA in 1757 and MA in 1760; but subsequently migrated to Sidney Sussex College on 19 December 1763. He was "humane and benevolent", with manners "soft and gentle, affable and condescending".

In 1770, Jenner published anonymously his only novel, The Placid Man, or Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville, which attained considerable success, and was republished with his name in 1773. In this, his one piece of sustained fictional narrative, Jenner departed from the epistolary form and followed Henry Fielding in telling his story from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator who both recounts the events of the story and comments upon related subjects. After The Placid Man, Jenner returned to poetry, and another volume of poems, entitled Town Eclogues, was published in 1772; 2nd edition 1773. He also published separately Louisa, a Tale, to which is added an Elegy to the Memory of Lord Lyttelton, the original manuscript of which came into the possession of his great-nephew, H. L. Jenner, Bishop of Dunedin.