Pratt was the son of a Congregational jeweller and watchmaker, William Pratt. He was active in the local Sunday School and preached and wrote poetry in adolescence. Pratt gained a Certificate of Science in 1867 and was by this time a working jeweller. He left for Australia in July 1869 with a parting gift of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Pratt played a prominent role in the Congregational Church in Adelaide, South Australia as Superintendent of the Stanley Street Sunday School and a founder of the Literary and Debating Society and a Young Men's Society. In April 1873 he married Mary Jane Beaney and they had four children.
In the 1880s Pratt was active in the Union Parliament of the South Australian Literary Societies' Union and devoted time to public speaking and writing. On 4 August 1884 he gave a paper to the Medindie Young Men's Society on 'Reading in Relation to Poetry' followed in June 1885 by an essay on 'A Night with Tennyson' in a local journal, The Fortnightly. In March 1886 Pratt wrote 'A Strange Story' about an English millionaire's attempts to defy gravity and ageing. In the same month his poem, 'The Bush Fire', was published in the Christian Colonist followed by 'Rain' and a story, 'A Fairy Tale for Children' in the same journal. 'Rain' was selected by Douglas Sladen (q.v.) for his centenary Australian Poets 1788-1888 (1888). This led Sir Charles Dilke in his Problems of Greater Britain (1890) to state that Pratt was one of the two best poets in South Australia having 'written the most beautiful and the most characteristic of Australian poems - a kind of hymn in praise of 'Rain'.'
Pratt and his family moved to Melbourne, Victoria in 1888 where Pratt was an accountant. In Melbourne Pratt attended the Independent Church in Collins Street in the city where he met A. Nicholas Hopkins, a solicitor, who was to be Pratt's literary mentor, tightening up his poetry and advising on publication. In June 1890 Pratt wrote 'An Australian National Anthem' which he had printed in broadsheet form by G. Ricketts & Co. in Carlton, Melbourne. This poem won the Improvement Societies' Union of Victoria prize; Pratt also won a special prize of three guineas 'for the best poem on an Australian subject' offered by the Governor of Western Australia.
Pratt ceased writing poetry during the 1890s depression and it was 1894 before he wrote poetry again. The period 1897-1908 saw a further 76 poems written with the federation of Australia a prominent theme. In October 1900 Pratt submitted his poems to Angus and Robertson for publication but they were rejected. This was to occur again in 1917. Winnifred Serle-Maghee submitted a sketch of an Australian poet by Pratt to Bertram Stevens (q.v.) who wrote: 'This is well written, but not timely. Anything the writer may send will be considered on its merits.' Pratt was to write very few poems after 1911. In 1912 one of his hymns was chosen for the new Congregational hymnal in the United Kingdom. Church work, charity and social work took up Pratt's time in his last years as well as his position as secretary of the Melbourne General Cemetery.
Source: John Fletcher, The Story of William Nathaniel Pratt (1847-1933) and The Poems That Weren't Published in 1917 (1990).
