OLDHAM, JOHN (1653–1683), poet, was born at Shipton-Moyne, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, 9 Aug. 1653. John Oldham, his grandfather, was rector of Nuneaton. John Oldham, his father, after residing as a nonconformist minister at Shipton, and at Newton in Wiltshire, where he was ‘silenced’ in 1662, served a small congregation at Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, and survived in honourable repute till about 1725 (Calamy and Palmer, Nonconformist's Memorial, 1803, iii. 368). These data both help to account for the straitened circumstances under which Oldham entered life, and refute the incredible tradition that his scurrilous ‘Character of a certain Ugly Old Priest’ was ‘written upon’ his father (see Works, ed. Thompson, iii. 162 n.)
After receiving his earlier education from his father, and at Tetbury grammar school, where he is stated to have begun his career as a private tutor by assisting in his studies the son of a Bristol alderman, Oldham entered at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1670. Although his ability and attainments are said to have found recognition here, he quitted the university after graduating B.A. in May 1674, and afterwards resided for some months in his father's house. In the following year he suffered the loss of his school and college friend, Charles Morwent, the son of a lawyer at Tetbury, to whose memory he dedicated the most elaborate of his poems. Soon after this he began life in the humble position of usher in Archbishop Whitgift's free school (since the parish school) at Croydon, where he remained about three years. In one of his satires, ‘To a Friend about to leave the University,’ he gave vent to his hatred of the position occupied by him at this ‘Grammar-Bridewell’ (Works, iii. 22):
A Dancing-Master shall be better paid,
Tho' he instructs the Heels, and you the Head.
During Oldham's residence at Croydon he is said to have received a visit from Rochester, Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, and some other fine gentlemen and wits, who, in the first instance, mistook for him the aged headmaster of the school. But though Oldham had enough wit and enough inclination to the obscene to please his polite visitors, there is nothing to show that his meeting with them had any direct effect upon his career. He left Croydon in 1678, and seems in the same year, on the recommendation of a barrister, Harman Atwood, whose death shortly afterwards he celebrated in a panegyrical ode, to have accepted the post of tutor to the grandsons of Sir Edward Thurland (not Theveland), a retired judge, residing near Reigate (Pepys, Diary, ed. Bright, ii. 85–6). Here he remained till 1681.
In 1679 had been printed, according to Wood without the author's consent, the first of Oldham's ‘Satires upon the Jesuits’ (an expression of the popular panic at the time of the ‘Popish plot’) and the so-called ‘Satire against Virtue,’ a production likewise in its way open to the charge of sensationalism, and reprinted accordingly in 1680 in an edition of Rochester's ‘Poems.’ The whole of the ‘Satires upon the Jesuits,’ together with the ‘Satire against Virtue’ and other pieces, were published, no doubt with Oldham's authority, in 1681; and in the same year appeared a volume containing a number of paraphrases and original pieces which seemed to him likely to catch the ear of the town. But Oldham was convinced of the folly of depending upon poetry (i.e. literary work) as the staff of life. Before this year (1681) was out, Oldham became tutor to the son of Sir William Hickes, at his residence near London. Through him he became acquainted with the celebrated physician Dr. Richard Lower [q. v.], by whose advice he is said to have betaken himself to the study of medicine. This he is asserted to have carried on for a year; but he makes no specific mention of medicine among the ‘thriving arts’ for which he subsequently declined to abandon his muse. He is further said to have refused an offer of Sir William Hickes to accompany his son on an Italian tour. He was much befriended by the Earl of Kingston (William Pierrepont, who succeeded to the title in 1682), and is even said to have been invited by him to become his domestic chaplain. But he was unwilling either to take orders or to essay an experience which he has graphically satirised in some of his best known lines (‘Some think themselves exalted to the Sky,’ &c., in ‘A Satire to a Friend about to leave the University’ in Works, iii. 23–4). In his last days he became personally known to Dryden and other wits
