James Carkesse
British writer
James Carkesse (c.1636–after 1683) was an English naval official and schoolteacher, a Fellow of the Royal Society now known for poetry written in Bethlem Hospital and an asylum in Finsbury.
Life
Carkesse was educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He became head of Magdalen College School, in 1663, and was elected F.R.S. in 1664. He worked in the Naval Office in London later in the 1660s, clerking under William Brouncker in 1666. There he was known to Samuel Pepys, and Pepys's Diary gives details of Carkesse and his dismissal from the office in 1667 and reinstatement. He finally lost his position, in 1673.
In the later 1670s he became delusional, and wrote a volume Lucida intervalla (1679) of doggerel verse, by which he is now remembered. He was confined in the private asylum of Thomas Allen at Finsbury, and then in the Bethlem Hospital, as indicated by the subtitle of the book. In 1683 he was head of Chelmsford School.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6131019. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1636, 1683, 1663 and 1664.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Carkesse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.