N. T. Carrington - Poet

N. T. Carrington was born in Plymouth in 1777, the son of a grocer who also worked in the Dockyard. His name is not settled: the Dictionary of National Biography calls him Noel Thomas Carrington, Wikipedia says Nicholas Toms, and his son's 1834 edition uses only the initials.

He was a clerk in the Dockyard, then a seaman on a man-of-war, then taught at a school in Maidstone for five years, where he married in 1805. In 1809 he opened his own academy at Plymouth Dock (Devonport) and ran it until about six months before he died on 2 September 1830, aged 53, leaving a widow and six children.

His books were The Banks of the Tamar (1820, though one source says 1828), Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem (1826) and My Native Village (1830). His Collected Poems came out in two volumes in 1834, edited by his son. The Dartmoor poem has a preface and notes by William Burt, secretary of the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, and etchings by P. H. Rogers.

The Dewerstone is the place most tied to him. In the 1834 text of the poem he writes "Upon the crest of Dewerstone. The hawk / Rested upon the aged cliff", and his own note singles it out from the cliffs of the valley of the Cad. At the top of Dewerstone Hill his name and death date are cut into the rock: CARRINGTON OBIT II SEPTEMBRIS MDCCCXXX. The sources do not say who cut it.

The painter John William Inchbold called the Dewar Stone "the favourite haunt of the poet Carrington" in an 1850 watercolour.

Image: Nicholas Toms (Noel Thomas) Carrington by Unknown artist, pencil, circa 1815-1820, NPG 1797b. © National Portrait Gallery, London, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.