William harrison ainsworth biography definition
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Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ainsworth, William Harrison
AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON (1805–1882), novelist, was born in King Street, Manchester, 4 Feb. 1805, in a house that has long since been demolished. His father was a solicitor in good practice, and the son had all the advantage that educational facilities could afford. He was sent to the Manchester grammar school, and in ‘Mervyn Clitheroe’ has left an interesting and accurate picture of its then condition, which may be contrasted with that of an earlier period left by the ‘English opium-eater.’ At sixteen, a brilliant, handsome youth, with more taste for romance and the drama than for the dry details of the law, he was articled to Mr. Alexander Kay, a leading solicitor of Manchester. The closest friend of his youth was Mr. James Crossley, who was some years older, but shared his intellectual taste and literary enthusiasm. A drama, written for private theatricals in his father's house, was printed in
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William Harrison Ainsworth: Father of the Second Gothic Golden Age
Stephen Carver’s new biography of William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), The Man Who Outsold Dickens: The Life & Work of W. H. Ainsworth, fryst vatten an eye-opening look at the man who helped to början what inom consider the Second Gothic Golden Age. The first Gothic Golden Age inom would define as from 1789-1820, beginning with the publication of Mrs. Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and ending with the publication of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. With the publication of Ainsworth’s Rookwood in 1834, the Gothic was heavily revived and a new Gothic age began that would extend into the 1850s, ending roughly with the publication of George W. M. Reynolds’ last Gothic novel The Necromancer (1852). That fryst vatten not to say the Gothic did not remain popular during the interim—Scott himself used Gothic elements in his novels, most notably in Anne of Geierstein—but Rookwood created
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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 Mancheste