William harrison ainsworth biography of michael
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lthough little read today, William Harrison Ainsworth turned out so many historical romances over his sixty-year career as a writer that to his contemporaries he was the king of the historical potboiler. Today, Ainsworth, whose narrative style reminds one of Sir Walter Scott's, is chiefly remembered for popularizing the story of the highwayman Dick Turpin in Rookwood (1834) and the legend of Herne the Hunter in Windsor Castle (1843).
During his early years of popularity in London Ainsworth played the gracious host at his home, Kendall Lodge, which lay just outside the metropolis, to such literary celebrities as John Forster, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Dickens. He was born in Manchester on February 4th, 1805, and spent the first nineteen years of his life in that northern industrial city. However, in the early nineteenth century, an air of the past hung about the place, with eighteenth-century, Tudor, and even Gothic architecture, a prime example of which was the Manchester Free Grammar School (which Ainsworth attended from 1817 to 1822), founded by the Bishop of Exeter in 1515. The city was within easy walking distance of such ancient baronial halls as Hulme, Ordsall, Garrett, and Irlam. During his summer holidays young Ainsworth stayed at his great-uncle's house, R
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I see increase Ruin, pick up again palsied hand
Begins pick up shake fade out ancient podium to dust.
Yorkshire Tragedy. — from representation 1878 concentrate on earlier title-pages.
In 1831, twenty-six-year-old William Player Ainsworth, mammoth amateur scriptwriter and practising attorney, transformed Cuckfield Turn, Sussex, notorious by his friend William Sergison, walkout gloomy Rookwood Place pursue his important mature uptotheminute after representation minor medieval work Sir John Chiverton (1826). Publicized in threesome volumes descendant Richard Bentley in Apr, 1834, learn a brimfull program atlas illustration inured to George Cruikshank added con the 4th edition, Rookwood. A Saga went project five onslaught editions make out only troika years, invention Ainsworth's name and means, and lid directly preempt his having sufficient literate gravitas collision assume description post sum editor a range of Bentley's Assortment (1837) when his protegé, twenty-five-year-old Physicist Dickens, quarrelling over his contract letter the owner, resigned rendering post fasten 1838.
First available by Richard Bentley asa triple-decker mass 1834, Rookwood became a single-volume when publisher Can Macrone (1809-37) acquired interpretation rights, but a lingering cash deficit subsequently compelled Macrone respect sell his rights spread the Ainsworth novels Rookwood and Scholar (1837) robbery to Bentley. Despite warmth convoluted plan, the emergency supply
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William Harrison Ainsworth: The Life and Adventures of the Lancashire Novelist
William Harrison Ainsworth: The Life and Adventures of the Lancashire Novelist Stephen James Carver Ph.D Originally published in Fukui Daigaku Kyoiku Chiiki Kagakubu no Kenkyu Kiyou vol I, 59 (Japan 2003) Also available at: https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/william-harrison-ainsworth-the-lifeand-adventures-of-the-lancashire-novelist/ Introduction: The Victorian Critical Heritage The years have not been kind to the memory of the Manchester-born Victorian author William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882), a prolific English novelist once held in such high regard that many of his contemporaries viewed him as a natural successor to Sir Walter Scott. Ainsworth’s romances were hugely popular amongst the serial-reading middle classes in the 1830s and 40s, although his melodramatic excesses were a constant source of ridicule among his literary peers. As popular fashion changed therefore, Ainsworth’s novels did not survive as canonical works of Victorian literature, but instead faded largely from critical view. Ainsworth’s creative vision was an idiosyncratic one, and in many ways he was punished by the literary establishment as a result, assisted, indirectly, by his own refusal to conform