Thomas Corser
British scholar and clergyman (1793-1876)

Thomas Corser (1793 – 24 August 1876) was a British literary scholar and Church of England clergyman. He was the editor of Collectanea Anglo-Poetica.
Life
Corser, third son of George Corser of Whitchurch, Shropshire, banker, and his wife Martha, daughter of Randall Phythian of the Higher Hall, Edge, Cheshire, was born at Whitchurch in 1793. From Whitchurch School he moved in 1808 to Manchester Grammar School; and from there, in May 1812, he was admitted a commoner of Balliol College, Oxford, taking with him one of the school exhibitions. He graduated B.A. in 1815, and M.A. in 1818.
It was during his residence at Oxford, and through his intimacy with Dr. Henry Cotton, sub-librarian of the Bodleian Library, that his love of early English poetry and Elizabethan literature was formed and his bibliographical tastes encouraged. In the early part of 1816 he was ordained to the curacy of Condover, near Shrewsbury, and in the following year received priest's orders, holding also the chaplaincy of Atcham Union at Berrington, Shropshire. From 1819 to 1821 he served as curate of the extensive parish of Stone, Staffordshire, and for the next year and a half was curate of Monmouth. Here, while meditating the acceptance of the English chaplaincy at Antwerp, he accepted the offer of the curacy of Prestwich, near Manchester, which proved the turning-point of his life.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Corser” 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.