Journalist and compiler under his own name and under pseudonym; appears in biographical compilations under pseudonym.
In answer to an inquiry from the Library of Congress, Siddons's son, Frederick Lincoln Siddons (1864-1931), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, wrote to the librarian, February 9 1917: " ... my father's full name was Joachim Heyward Siddons, and as I remember the date of his birth, it was July 21 1801. I think in his earlier life he frequently used as a pseudonym an anglicized form of his mother's name, and in that form as you have it 'J. H. Stocqueler'; but he did not always use the pseudonym in writing.
"My impression is, although I have no personal knowledge, that his father and mother had separated, she returning with her children to England, my father and a brother and sister having been born in India, and it may be, although I do not know it, of course, that she may have gone back to her maiden name in the anglicized form that I have mentioned".
According to his Memoirs, Siddons attended an academy in Camden Town; enlisted, as "Stocqueler" in military service of East India Co.; stationed six months at Chatham barracks; sent with his detachment to Bombay, 1819; served as army office clerk; at about age twenty-four purchased discharge from army, having become interested in journalism; was proprietor and editor of various newspapers and sporting magazines in Bombay and Calcutta, among them the Calcutta Englishman; made two visits to England before his final departure from India in 1843. In England, had some connection with theatre as writer of farces and as actor and manager; lectured on India and on the Crimean War; became connected with various periodicals, e.g., Atlas, Court Journal, United Service Gazette. Sent to the U.S. in 1860 to spread favourable publicity for the vessel Great Eastern; gave lectures and readings; wrote for New York Evening Post during Civil War; returned to England in 1864. Author or compiler of some thirty works: books of travel, military and historical handbooks, works on India, a life of Wellington, a history of the U.S., a Shakespeare cyclopaedia. His Memoirs of a Journalist, first published in the Times of India, then in book form, 1873, was suppressed (Dictionary of National Biography).
His association with Dickens Siddons recounted in his Memoirs and in "Souvenirs of Charles Dickens", Wood's Illustrated Household Magazine (Newburgh, N.Y.), 1875. In the two accounts, Siddons recorded that while stationed at Chatham he had become acquainted with Dickens when Dickens was a young boy; that while he was in India, Dickens sent him a copy of Pickwick, accompanied by a letter recalling their early association; and that, on his furloughs from India, he visited Dickens. Late in 1845, Siddons must have written to Dickens concerning the Daily News. Carter's article mentions an undated letter from Dickens to him, explaining the editorial policy of the forthcoming newspaper. Among the public readings that Siddons delivered in New York was one of Dickens's readings—the Bardell-Pickwick trial scene; that, combined with his reading of scenes from Shakespeare, resulted in his being asked to become "Professor of Elocution and English Literature" at Columbia College (Memoirs, p. 247).
Writing about the sources of information on the East and on the Crimean War available to Englishmen, Sala, in his H.W. article "Some Amenities of War", mentioned Siddons's diorama lectures: "A shilling, and half-an-hour's walk, and Messrs. Grieve and Telbin, or Mr. Beverley, will transport us to the seat of war, and show us water as blue, and minarets as white ... as the actual things of three thousand years ago; while the urbane Mr. Stocqueler, or the voluble Mr. Kenney, will talk like agreeable books, and save us the trouble of reading and travelling, and yet teach us more than we might gain by either".
Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
