Author: Collier, John
Biography:
COLLIER, John (1708-86: ODNB)
Pseudonyms Timothy Bobbins, Tim Bobbin
He was born in Urmston, Lancashire, on 16 Dec. 1708, the third of nine children of John Collier (d 1739) and his wife Mary Cook (d 1726), and was baptised in Manchester on 12 Mar. 1709. His father was master of the school in Glazebrook, Rixton, Lancashire. Collier briefly attended school in Urmston but when his father’s sight deteriorated in 1722 Collier was apprenticed to a Dutch loom weaver. Disliking the servitude of an apprenticeship, he left after a year and worked as an itinerant teacher in the Manchester area before becoming an assistant to the Rev. Robert Pearson, master of the free school in Milnow, Rochdale. He became master of the school in 1742 and, except for a brief period, retained that position for the rest of his life. His meagre salary always needed supplementing and Collier worked as a hedge lawyer and, later, a painter who specialised in inn signs. He married Mary Clay of Huddersfield on 1 Apr. 1744; they had nine children of whom two died in infancy. As Tim Bobbin—the pseudonym presumably selected because of his short-lived training as a weaver—he published his A View of the Lancashire Dialect, or, Tummus and Mary in 1746. It went through multiple editions and is recognised as the first significant publication in the Lancashire dialect. In 1750 Collier took up a position as a clerk at a woollen factory near Halifax but, disliking the work, returned to the school at Milnow in Dec. 1751. Teaching does not seem to have taken up much of his time: he travelled widely across the north of England distributing his painted signs and panels which often depicted grotesque caricatures. Collier described himself as the Lancashire Hogarth and the title page of his Human Passions Delineated refers to his “Hogarthian” style. His reformist political views meant that some of his writings had to be printed clandestinely; for example, the title page of his 1757 Truth in a Mask gives Amsterdam not Manchester as the place of publication and the preface is signed “T. B.” rather than Tim Bobbin. His wife died in Milnow on 4 June 1786 and he followed her on 14 July. They were interred together in the cemetery at Rochdale. (ODNB 12 Feb. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 12 Feb. 2024; Lancashire Gazette 14 Jan. 1826)