Author: Ashworth, Percy
Biography:
ASHWORTH, Percy (1810-44: ancestry.co.uk)
Percy Macaulay Ashworth was born on 19 Oct. 1810 and baptised on 17 Mar. 1811 in the Ellenbrook Chapel, Worsley, Manchester, the sixth of ten children of Richard Johnson Daventry Ashworth (1772-1828), barrister, and his wife Anne Macaulay (1781-1863), who had married at Huddersfield in 1801. His father had a large practise in Manchester and was also a fine-art collector. The family lived at Strawberry Hill House, Pendleton, where the children were born. They also had property at Lightcliffe, near Halifax. He was educated at Manchester School and Wadham College Oxford (matric. 1829, BA 1833). He also entered the Inner Temple and was called to the bar on 18 Nov. 1843. His poem The Suttees (1831) won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford but he published nothing further. (Jane Theodosia Phelps, q.v., also responded to the Oxford prize subject but would have been ineligible to submit her work.) He died from delirium tremens (possibly due to alcoholism) at his residence in Bridge Street, Chester, on 10 Nov. 1844, and was buried at St. John the Baptist, Chester. (ancestry.co.uk 5 Feb. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 5 Feb. 2022; J. F. Smith, The Admission Register of the Manchester School [1874] 3: i 66, 3: ii 196; Reading Mercury 6 and 27 June 1831; Morning Post 20 Nov. 1843, 16 Nov. 1844) AA