William Rathbone : a memoir / by Eleanor F. Rathbone.

  • Eleanor Rathbone
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Rathbone : a memoir / by Eleanor F. Rathbone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Dr. Shepherd was the squib-writer of the party, and one of its best speakers. He kept a boys’ school at Gateacre, which was well-known among the Nonconformist gentry of the northern coun¬ ties ; and, like Roscoe, he wrote about Italian mediaeval history. He and another intimate friend, the Rev. John Yates, were both ministers of Unitarian chapels. Outside Liverpool, Wedgwood the potter, John Dalton the chemist,1 the Darbys of Coal- brookdale, and Abraham Shackleton the Irish Quaker, whose father was Edmund Burke’s schoolmaster, were among William Rathbone’s friends. He was a copious letter-writer, and wdth some of these and other friends he kept up an active correspondence, chiefly on the two subjects of religion and politics, in which it is clear his real self lived and moved and had its being. In politics he was what would be called in the Eng¬ land of to-day a thorough-going Radical and Little Englander. Free Trade and a consistent 1 In the Life of John Dalton there is a letter which gives a lively picture of the free social intercourse between these Liverpool “ Reformers.” One wonders in reading it how busy men of strenuous spirit found time to pay each other so many and such lengthy visits. “The etiquette in Liverpool,” he says, a propos of a dinner at Greenbank, “is to sit down to dinner a little after three ; as soon as the cloth is drawn, in winter, candles are brought in ; when the bottle has gone round about half an hour, the ladies retire j the gentlemen remain till a servant informs them tea is ready, when all meet together again in the tea-room, where they remain till they are informed supper is on the table.”
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