(Found) To whom is this passage referring?

[M. Robert Gibson]

I've just started reading George Macdonald Fraser's The Pyrates

The first chapter does a lot of setting the scene, to let us know it is set in the latter half of the 17th century - mentions of Pepys and Charles II and Henry Morgan and John Evelyn.

And then there is this passage:

when a dear old tinker was dying of the cold, poor and humble and unnoticed by the great world, with the sound of choiring angels in his ears and no notion that one day he would be remembered as the greatest writer of plain English that ever was:

So who is he?

I thought maybe Milton, but he was more a poet and didn't die in poverty

Help!

 

[nixie]

Could be wrong but think it's John Bunyan.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

I think you are correct @nixie

I've looked him up on Wikipedia

John Bunyan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Following his release from prison in 1672 Bunyan probably did not return to his former occupation of a tinker

n 1688, on his way to London to the house of his friend, grocer John Strudwick of Snow Hill, Bunyan made a detour to Reading, Berkshire, to try and resolve a quarrel between a father and son. Travelling on from there to London, he was caught in a storm and fell ill with a fever. He died in Strudwick's house on the morning of 31 August 1688

Bunyan's estate at his death was worth £42 19s 0d (about £5,200 in 2021)

So yes, most probably Bunyan

Thanks, saved me much internet searching