James Theobald, F. R. S. (1688-1759), merchant and natural historian

Abstract

Although James Theobald’s background is somewhat complex, documentary sources help to place it in perspective. He was baptised on 21 June 1688 at St Mary’s Church, Lambeth, and later served an apprenticeship to his father Peter as a Barber- Surgeon from 1704 until 1712. However, the family’s real business was that of major timber merchants, importing supplies from Norway for Peter Theobald’s timber yard at Narrow Wall in Lambeth. A Chancery Proceedings case shows that both James and his younger brother Peter (born in 1694) were actively engaged in the timber trade by 1721, or even earlier. James Theobald was living at Belvedere House, near the present Royal Festival Hall site, when he wrote in 1724 to Sir Hans Sloane, requesting medical advice for a sick workman. They were evidently on friendly terms, as an entry in Sloane’s catalogue of ‘Fishes’ records: ‘Two carps from Norway given me by Mr. Theobald who hath some of them alive at his house at Belvedere near Lambeth’. It was on Sloane’s recommendation that Theobald was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 4 November 1725. A year later, on 23 November, he became a member of the Society of Antiquaries, having been proposed by Johann Caspar Scheuchzer, Sloane’s amanuensis and the translator of Kaempfer’s classic, the History of Japan , to which both James and his brother Peter subscribed in 1727. In the same year he and his brother were made freemen of the Barber-Surgeons Company, and James was appointed Secretary, or Co-adjutor, of the Society of Antiquaries, a post which he held from 1728 until about 1735.