[2] His grandfather, another Richard Sharp (c. 1690–1775), from a family of clothiers at Romsey, Hampshire, had been apprenticed in 1712 to George Baker, a freeman of the Goldsmiths' Company of London, but a haberdasher of hats by trade.
He completed his apprenticeship, and by the early 1730s he was George Baker's partner in the successful hatting business on Fish Street Hill in the City of London.
[3] Baker & Sharp were frequent buyers of beaver at Hudson's Bay Company sales,[4] which they would have supplied to felt-makers who made the felt "hoods" from which finished hats were fashioned.
His only son, also called Richard, had obtained a commission as ensign in the 40th Regiment of Foot in 1756, was stationed at St John's, Newfoundland, where he married a local woman, Elizabeth Adams in 1759, and returned to England about 1763, dying in London two years later.
Next year old Richard Sharp made his will, in which he recorded that Davis had agreed to take one of the grandsons as an apprentice when he was old enough, and eventually make him a partner in the hatting business for a three-sevenths share.
Provisions were also made to loan substantial sums from the estate to Thomas Cable Davis, who must not have had enough capital to maintain the business on his own, if old Sharp's share was taken out by his executors.
It was not hard to enter the ranks of society where that was possible – he had some family money and there were plenty of individuals in and about the City, many of them young, who enjoyed thought-provoking books, fashionable ideas and good conversation.
A commentator described Sharp at about the age of 30 as: already a figure in society, where his great conversational powers and his unbounded goodness of heart made him universally welcome.
His acquired knowledge of the shipping business, for instance, enabled him to give crucial support and advice to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1804 when the poet was about to leave England for health reasons.
Despite his modest roots, Richard Sharp's exceptional cleverness and powers of conversation gained him acceptance in the highest social circles and led to him acquiring a lasting sobriquet.
In this particular his conversation is highly interesting; from his talent of painting by incidents and minute ordinary features, he almost carries you back to the society of those great personages and makes you live for a moment in their presence.Horner later wrote to Lady Mackintosh in 1805 in the same admiring tones, complaining that he simply could not get enough of Sharp's company and telling her: "Sharp I respect and love more and more every day; he has every day new talents and new virtues to show."
Macaulay was similarly impressed and commented in a letter to his sister before leaving for India: The other day I had a long talk with Sharp about everything and everybody – metaphysics, poetry, politics, scenery and paintings.
The Rogers family in Newington Green was well known in Dissenting circles, and the names of Joseph Priestley, Samuel Parr, Richard Price, Rev.
At his cottage retreat in Mickleham, Surrey, he received politicians, artists, scientists and some of the cleverest minds of the day, including some from abroad, such as the intriguing but formidable Mme de Staël.
Guests recorded include Henry Hallam, Thomas Colley Grattan, Sydney Smith, John Stuart Mill, James Mill, Basil Hall, Dugald Stewart, Horne Tooke, Lord Jeffrey, Archbishop Whately, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, George Crabbe, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Richard Porson, Maria Edgeworth, Francis Chantrey, and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
[16] By the late 1780s Sharp was at the hub of the Dissenter movement in London at a crucial time when Revolution was in the air and young Whig intellectuals such as he fell under suspicion.
[19] In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed and Thomas Clarkson records that Richard Sharp was elected onto it along with David Hartley.
Sharp's initiative precedes that of a better known contemporary, George Birkbeck, also from a Dissenter background, whose Mechanics' Institutes developed in Glasgow, London and elsewhere from the 1820s onwards.
He had suffered all his life with a cough and a bad chest and Torquay was noted for both its health-giving air and Italianate landscape, but in 1834 the winter was particularly severe and as Sharp succumbed he resolved that he would die in his beloved London.
It is said that, fearful that a nephew might obtain and subvert his will, 70-year-old George Philips, in a final act of kindness, set off on his horse "Canon" and rode through the night as fast as he could to ensure that this did not occur.