Woodley, George (bap. 1786, d. 1846), poet and Church of England clergyman, was born in Dartmouth, and baptized at Townstal church there on 3 April 1786. He was the son of Richard Woodley. Woodley was largely self-taught, and began writing poetry aged eleven, while serving on a British man-of-war. After several years at sea, he lived at Plymouth Dock and then in London, trying to make a living as a writer. His first anthology, Mt. Edgcumbe, with The Shipwreck, and Miscellaneous Verses, was published anonymously in 1804. In that year, too, he competed for the gold medal of the Royal Humane Society for the best essay on the means of preventing shipwreck. Through a change of dates on the part of the society the essay arrived after the distribution of the prizes, but he claimed to have anticipated the invention of George William Manby. His lack of recognition here, and from the many authorities he approached with his scheme, left him lastingly bitter. His address to Dr Hawes (GM, 1st ser., 77, 1807, 1051–2) is dated from Dover.

In late 1808, Woodley left London for health reasons, and soon afterwards settled at Truro as editor of the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the tory paper of the county. Here he wrote poetry and some music, and competed for prize essays on theological and social subjects. The Churchyard and other Poems (1808) was followed in 1812, while he was living at Park Street in Plymouth, by Portugal Delivered. In the postscript to this work, he commented ‘I can sit down, if not with perfect resignation, yet with some sort of lethargic acquiescence, under the cloud which is permitted to overshadow me’. Several of his better-known works were published soon afterwards: Redemption (1816); Cornubia (1819); and his only work to run to two editions, The Divinity of Christ Proved (1819; 2nd edn, 1821), for which essay he also received a prize of £50 from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The Gazetteer of the County of Cornwall, published at Truro about 1817, has been attributed to Woodley.

About June 1820 Woodley was ordained by the bishop of Exeter, and went to the Isles of Scilly as a missionary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, earning £150 per annum, on the islands of St Martins and St Agnes. He was ordained priest by Bishop Carey in Exeter Cathedral on 15 July 1821. During his years at Scilly, he rebuilt the church on St Martins, and restored that on St Agnes. Probably also in this period, he married a Mary Fabian at Stoke Damerel, and they had one son, William Augustus. Woodley published a well regarded View of the Present State of the Scilly Isles in 1822.

In June 1842 Woodley retired with a gratuity of £100 and a life pension of £75 per annum. He was appointed on 12 February 1843 to the perpetual curacy of Martindale in Westmorland which he held until his death there on 24 December 1846. His wife died at Taunton in August 1856. Their son was the proprietor of the Somerset County Gazette (Taunton) and other papers; he died in Bristol, on 11 March 1891, and was buried in St Mary's cemetery, Taunton.

W. P. COURTNEY, reviewed JESSICA HININGS