I have just posted a link on the Audiobooks page to Andy Minter's wonderful Librivox recording of The Lancashire Witches by Harrison Ainsworth, which brings me to my third Old Mancunian, as former pupils of Manchester Grammar School (or some of them at least) like to call themselves. Although Harrison Ainsworth made a name for himself in London, he was a Lancashire and he dedicated Mervyn Clitheroe to his 'contemporaries at the Manchester school'. The book is set mainly in rural Cheshire, but also in smoky, industrial 'Cottonborough', where Mervyn spends his schooldays at the 'Cottonborough Free Grammar School'. 'I cannot say much in praise of the architectural beauty of the school', he writes, 'for, if truth must be spoken, it was exceedingly ugly'. 'It was a large, dingy, smoke-begrimed brick building, with copings of stone, and had so many windows that it looked like a lantern. In front, between the angles of the pointed roof, was placed a stone effigy of the bird of wisdom, which seemed to gaze down at us with its great goggle eyes as we passed by, as if muttering, "Enter this academic abode over which I preside, and welcome, but you'll never come out as clever as I"'.
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Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English opium-eater, is the second of my Manchester Grammar School old boys. De Quincey was born in Manchester, but left after the death of his father and then returned at the age of 15 to attend the school. His studies there lasted less than 2 years, ending when he fled the city in a fit of pique because his guardians would not release his inheritance so that he could immediately enroll at Oxford University. De Quincey's recollections of the school are somewhat jaundiced and were no doubt influenced by his precocious talent for ancient languages. He is at pains to point that his knowledge of Greek was superior to that of the headmaster, Charles Lawson, from the day he arrived, and in his later reminiscences he points out that he generously disguised him as a 'doctor', when in fact he was not. In his additional texts to the Confessions, he has this to say of the school: "It was (1.) ancient, having in fact been founded by a bishop of Exeter in an early part of the sixteenth century, so as to be now, in 1856, more than 330 years old; (2.) it was rich, and was annually growing richer; and (3.) it was dignified by a beneficial relation to the magnificent University of Oxford".
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Phil Benson
Born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, which it still is really. Exiled in sunny Sydney, I love to read Lancashire books Archives
March 2013
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