Samuel Rogers

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), a poet and banker, was raised in a Presbyterian congregation at Stoke Newington, where he attended a dissenting academy. Rogers contemplated the Presbyterian ministry, but his father wished him to enter the bank where he worked. While working at the bank he pursued his literary studies, and in 1792 published The Pleasures of Memory, for which he is best known, a work situated between Akenside’s Pleasure of the Imagination and Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope. The volume went through fifteen editions by 1806. His politics were reformist (he was a friend of Charles James Fox) and his salon in London was frequented by many of the radicals. In 1796 Rogers became a fellow of the Royal Society. After 1805 he lived a life of literary activity, enjoying a handsome retirement from the bank. Among his other works is Human Life (1819).