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Author: Gregson, John Stanley

Biography:

GREGSON, John Stanley (1800-37: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 17 Nov. 1800 and registered at St. George’s Road Baptist Chapel, Manchester, the second of three children of John Gregson, linen-draper and calico printer, and his wife Mary Brown, who had married in Derby in 1797. He was educated at the Moravian school in Fairfield and then served an apprenticeship with Thomas Fowler, bookseller and newspaper proprietor in St. Anne’s Square, Manchester. He may have set up in business on his own for a few years before going back to work for Fowler. He set up again in trade with a partner as a silk-throwster but failed, and he underwent bankruptcy proceedings 1829. He then became a bookseller at 51 Market Street but ill health and debt led to further bankruptcy proceedings. Suffering from the final stages of consumption, he went to live with his younger sister, Mary (Gregson) Bridgett, at Brixton Hill, Lambeth, South London, where he died on 2 Oct. 1837 and was buried three days later at St. Matthew’s, Brixton. Gimcrackiana  (1833) is a lively collection with descriptions of the Cannon Street area of Manchester, a parody on Gray’s Elegy, “A Morning in the Manchester Subscription Library, Exchange Street,” and “The Mad Dogs of Liverpool.” Some of the poems had previously appeared in the Manchester Guardian and the Kaleidoscope(Liverpool). He also published A Code of Common Sense, or Patent Pocket Dictionary(1833) and The Comical Budget of Fun and Frolic (1835). (ancestry.co.uk 14 Mar. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 14 Mar. 2023; Philip A. Sykas, Pathways in the Nineteenth-Century British Textile Industry [2022]; Richard Wright Proctor, Memorials of Manchester Streets [1874], 74-5, and Memorials of Bygone Manchester [1880] 86-7; Manchester Courier 7 Oct. 1837; London Gazette 14 Aug. 1829, 23 Sept. 1831) AA

 

Books written (1):

Manchester/ Derby: the author/ Thomas Richardson, 1833