John Byrom

John Byrom , 1692-1763, English shorthand expert and poet, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He devised an early shorthand system, which he taught in Manchester. Although he copyrighted his system in 1742, his book, The Universal English Shorthand, was not published until after his death. He was a great admirer of William Law, and much information about Law is found in Byrom's Private Journal and Literary Remains (1854-57). He wrote Seasonably Alarming and Humiliating Truths in a Metrical Version of Certain Select Passages Taken from the Works of William Law (1774) and other facilely rhyming, rather eccentric religious verse.

Byrom, John (1692–1763), had many varied literary, linguistic, religious, and scientific interests, and was from 1724 a fellow of the Royal Society; his varied acquaintance included Hartley, the Wesleys, J. Butler, and, notably, Law, of whom he left interesting accounts in his Private Journals and Literary Remains (1854–7). Byrom had Jacobite sympathies and was, like Law, a non-juror; he was the author of the ambiguously loyal toast, beginning ‘God bless the King! I mean the Faith's Defender…’ His Miscellaneous Poems (1773) include some curious versifications of Law's Serious Call and the well-known hymn ‘Christians, awake! Salute the happy morn’.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee originally names applied to the composers Bononcini (1670–1747) and Handel, in a 1725 satire by John Byrom (1692–1763), ‘Strange all this difference should be, 'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.’

The nursery rhyme featuring Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and their agreement to ‘have a battle’, is recorded from the early 19th century, and they were later developed as two identical characters in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1872).