Life

He was the second son of the three sons and two daughters of John Tickell (1729–1782 - a clerk in chancery, and magistrate in Dublin) and his wife Esther Pierson - this made him a grandson of the poet Thomas Tickell

Thomas Tickell

Thomas Tickell was a minor English poet and man of letters.-Life:The son of a clergyman, he was born at Bridekirk near Cockermouth, Cumberland. He was educated at St Bees School 1695-1701, and in 1701 entered the Queen's College, Oxford, taking his M.A. degree in 1709...

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His father had moved his family to New Windsor

New Windsor

New Windsor may refer to:*New Windsor, Illinois, United States*New Windsor, Maryland, United States*New Windsor, New York, United States*New Windsor, New Zealand, AucklandNew Windsor may also refer to:*Windsor, Berkshire, England...

, Berkshire, as a result of the disturbances in Dublin, and so Richard is said to have been born at Bath, where he later built Beaulieu House

Beaulieu House

Beaulieu, or Beaulieu House, is a historic mansion located on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, built originally in 1859 by the Peruvian merchant, Federico Barreda, who made his money in the 1850s guano trade...

, Newbridge Hill. Richard may have been educated at Harrow School

Harrow School

Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

 or Winchester College

Winchester College

Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...

 and been an assistant at Eton College

Eton College

Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....

, though this is contentious. He definitely entered at the Middle Temple

Middle Temple

The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers; the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn...

 on 8 November 1768, and appointed one of the sixty commissioners of bankruptcy, though he was deprived of this place in 1778 until his acquaintance David Garrick

David Garrick

David Garrick was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer who influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice throughout the 18th century and was a pupil and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson...

 successfully petitioned Lord Chancellor Bathurst.

On 15 October 1778 Richard's musical entertainment "The Camp" was a success at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Three weeks later Tickell declined to write a prologue for Garrick, due to other commitments writing the satirical pamphlet "Anticipation". On 25 July 1780 Tickell married Mary Linley

Mary Linley

Mary Linley was one of 7 musical siblings born to Thomas Linley the elder and his wife Mary Johnson. She sang publicly until she married the playwright Richard Tickell in 1780....

 (1758–1787), a singer and sister-in-law to Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For thirty-two years he was also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons for Stafford , Westminster and Ilchester...

 (Sheridan persuaded Tickell to use his satirical talent in support of Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox PC , styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned thirty-eight years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and who was particularly noted for being the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger...

). Tickell is said already to have had a family with a live-in mistress, Miss B. After his marriage he had a grant of rooms in Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace is a royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Greater London; it has not been inhabited by the British royal family since the 18th century. The palace is located south west of Charing Cross and upstream of Central London on the River Thames...

. His opera in three acts, called "The Carnival of Venice", was successfully produced at Drury Lane on 13 December 1781 (with his sister-in-law Elizabeth Linley writing some of the songs, and Mary the music). An adaptation of The Gentle Shepherd of Allan Ramsay

Allan Ramsay (poet)

Allan Ramsay was a Scottish poet , playwright, publisher, librarian and wig-maker.-Life and career:...

, performed on 27 May 1789, was his last theatrical work. Some of his other plays and his pamphlets include:

• "The Wreath of Fashion" (1778)
• "The Green Box of Monsieur de Sartine", an adaptation from the French (1779)

Tickell's second wife, whom he married in 1789, was Sarah, a beautiful girl of eighteen, daughter of Captain Ley HEICS of the Berrington East Indiaman. However, financial difficulties in 1793 led him into depression and ultimately suicide on 4 November by jumping from the parapet outside the window of his rooms at Hampton Court (though Sheridan convinced the inquest into returning a verdict of accidental death, and took the children of Tickell's first marriage into his care, obtaining admission into the navy for Richard (1782–1805), and a writership in India for Samuel (1785–1817). R. E. Tickell maintains that the third child of this marriage was a daughter, Elizabeth Anne (1781–1860), who was unmarried when she died at her Bedford Square London home. It is certain, however, that Tickell had another daughter, Zipporah, who later married Ebenezer Roebuck, an employee of the British East India Company

British East India Company

The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...

, and became the mother of John Arthur Roebuck

John Arthur Roebuck

John Arthur Roebuck , British politician, was born at Madras, in India.After the death of his father, a civil servant, his mother's second marriage transferred him to Canada, where he was chiefly brought-up. He came to England in 1824, was called to the bar John Arthur Roebuck (28 December 1802...

 (1802–1879). Tickell's second wife's behaviour after his death gained her the censure of Tickell's contemporaries, as she was said to have had a small dowry but expensive tastes, keeping a coach and four but not paying off her husband's debts - in 1796 she remarried, to John Cotton Worthington, a major in the Sussex fencible cavalry

Fencibles

The Fencibles were army regiments raised in the United Kingdom and in the colonies for defence against the threat of invasion during the American War of Independence and French Revolutionary Wars in the late 18th century...

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