He was born on July 13, 1761 in Newbury, Massachussets, United States, the eldest of eight children born to Jonathan and Abigail (Greenleaf) Plummer. His father, a well-to-do cordwainer, was a descendant of Francis Plumer who emigrated to Boston in 1634 and was one of the founders of Newbury.
Early given to understand that he was "peculiar, " Plummer was permitted but a meager share of school education.
Unhappy at home, he became a traveling trader, then, successively, country-school teacher, militiaman, and scullion in a tavern. Everywhere he sought the friendship of owners of books, in this way securing opportunity to read Shakespeare, Montaigne, Ovid, Dryden, Swift, Sterne, and Cervantes. But "Allan Ramsay's tuneful works, " he says, "ravished my soul with such transporting joys that I soon attempted to write in poetry myself. " A brief career as itinerant preacher ended in discouragement.
Success attended him as a trader, however, and he soon began to print and peddle his sermons. A Plummer broadside issued in 1795 bore this colophon: "The author still continues to carry on his various branches of trifling business" and enumerates, among other enterprises, the filling of underbeds with straw, pawnbrokerage, the buying of bottles, the treatment of secret diseases, and the writing of love letters in prose or verse.
A fellow citizen's sudden rise from poverty to wealth gave Plummer the material for a broadside called The Author's Congratulatory Address to Citizen Timothy Dexter on His Attaining an Independent Fortune (1793). Dexter, craving notoriety, exploited Plummer's peculiar genius. Styling himself "Lord, " he employed the ballad-monger as poet laureate, and decked him out in a long black frock coat garnished with silver stars and fringes, an imposing cocked hat, large-buckled shoes, and a goldheaded cane.
After Dexter's death (1806), Plummer, reduced again to peddling, at times became objectionably personal in his printed sermons. Characteristic is one entitled Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing. Subjects include elegies, private scandals, suicides, executions and dying confessions, Indian massacres, epidemics, shipwrecks and similar "acts of God. " He also wrote Sketch of the History of the Life of Jonathan Plummer, which was issued (c. 1797) in pamphlet form in three parts.
He died in Newburyport, supposedly of self-starvation.
To a contemporary he appeared as a strange and wayward boy, who had a great fondness for reading, and possessed a remarkable memory. His face was long, with a prominent nose, wide mouth, and thick lips. His voice was deep-toned and solemn.
At the age of twenty-six he decided to marry for money. Decisive rejections by nine "vigorous and antiquated virgins" in two months left him vowing celibacy.
