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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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JOHN MITFORD (1782 - 1831) Born at Newton Red House in Mitford, he was a member of the elder branch of the Mitfords of Mitford castle, and a remote cousin of Lord Redesdale, who sponsored him for the navy and supported him and his family throughout their lives. Mitford served at the battle of the Nile in 1798, but was discharged from the service on grounds of insanity. He then turned to journalism and poetry, but became poverty-stricken. He worked for disreputable magazines like The Scourge and Bon Ton and wrote naval poetry as in The Poems of a British Sailor (1818). A story entitled 'The Vampyre' appeared in 1819 supposedly by Byron, Polidori and Mitford: Byron repudiated it. The publisher who employed Mitford realised that he had become an alcoholic and, to keep up the flow of production, paid him only a shilling a day, which he spent on bread, cheese and an onion - and gin. Mitford lived and worked for weeks in the open in a gravel pit and slept on a bed of grass and nettles. He claimed to have seen Lady Hamilton being rowed round the Minerva to see a corpse swinging from the ropes. Apparently unable to tell truth from fiction, Mitford wrote a libellous Life of Sir John Sylvester , and probably The Private Life of Lord Byron, Comprising his Voluptuous Amours. He died in the workhouse.
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