Joseph Cradock, FSA (1741/2 – 1826) was an English man of letters, writer, bibliophile and amateur actor.
He had already acquired a taste for the stage and for London society, and left Cambridge without daring to face the examination for a degree.
[1] In 1765 Cradock married Anna Francesca, third daughter of Francis Stratford of Merivale Hall, Warwickshire.
He gave private theatricals at Gumley, where David Garrick offered to play the Ghost to his Hamlet, and in 1769 took a conspicuous part at the Stratford jubilee of Shakespeare's death.
In 1771 a tragedy by Cradock, called Zobeide, founded on Voltaire's Les Scythes, was performed at Covent Garden with success.
Voltaire acknowledged the work in a note dated Ferney, 9 October 1773, in which he says: Thanks to your muse, a foreign copper shines, Turned into gold and coined in sterling lines.
In 1773 he wrote a pamphlet called The Life of John Wilkes, Esq., in the manner of Plutarch, a Wilkite mob having broken his windows in Dean Street.
His friend, George Dyer, spoke favourably of the generosity of his feelings, and added that he was strictly temperate, living chiefly on very small quantities of turnips, roasted apples, and coffee, and never drinking wine.