Walker, Thomas
WALKER, THOMAS (1784-1836), English police magistrate, best known as author of The Original, was born on the loth of October 1784 at Charlton-cum-Hardy, near Manchester, where his father was a prosperous cotton merchant and an active Whig politician. He was educated at Cambridge and called to the bar, and after devoting some years mainly to the study of the Poor Law was made police magistrate in Lambeth in 1829. In 1835 he started his weekly publication The Original, containing his reflections on various social subjects and especially on eating and drinking; and it is in the history of gastronomy, and the art of dining, that this curious and amusing work is famous. The weekly numbers continued for six months, and subsequently were republished, after Walker's death on the 20th of January 1836, in an American selection (1837), in editions by W. B. Jerrold (with memoir) (1874), W. A. Guy (1875), and Henry Morley (1887), and in another selection of Sir Henry Cole (" Felix Summerley"), called Aristology (1881).
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
