Norton Nicholls - Correspondent of Thomas Gray

Biography

Son of Norton Nicholls, merchant, and Jane Floyer, dau of Lieut-Col Charles Floyer. Educated at Eton, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met William Johnson Temple. Ordained in 1767, he became the rector of Lound and Bradwell, Suffolk (1767-1809). An able landscape designer (Link).

A close friend of the poet Thomas Gray in Gray's later days. Nicholls and Gray made an excursion through the Western Counties in 1770, which makes one think of Boswell and Johnsons tour of the Hebrides in 1773, and in some other ways, the relationship between the two resembles that of Boswell and Johnson. Nicholls wrote Reminiscences of Gray, which appears to have been published later on in some editions of the Correpondence between the two.

Life with James Boswell

Temple introduced Boswell to Nicholls, an old Cambridge chum of his, on May 13, 1763. Boswell and Nicholls met a few times more before Boswell left for Holland in August of that year. They didn't meet again until Augustu 10, 1774 in Edinburgh. Nicholls's cousin Frances Floyer was married to John Francis Erskine, an old classmate of Boswell's at Edinburgh University.

Recommended literature

The Correspondence of Thomas Gray and the Rev Norton Nicholls was published in 1843, and is often available via the AbeBooks used books search engine.

Mentioned in

Norton Nicholls is mentioned in:

• London Journal 1762-1763