Author: Lister, Thomas
Biography:
LISTER, Thomas (1810-80: ODNB)
He was born on 11 Feb. 1810 at Bleach House, near Barnsley, Yorkshire, the youngest of fourteen children of Quaker parents, Joseph Lister (1760-1826), weaver, small farmer and gardener, and his wife, Susanna Bottomley (1764-1831), who had married in 1786. He was educated at Ackworth school (1821-24) and then worked for his father. In 1832 during the parliamentary election some of his poems came to the attention of Lord Morpeth who offered him the post of master of the post-office in Barnsley--but he declined it because of the Quaker interdiction on oaths of office. He then worked for some time in a linen warehouse. In 1837 he went on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland and the following year to France, Northern Italy, and Switzerland. He contributed an account of his journey and various poems written abroad to Tait’s Magazine. In 1839 he was appointed postmaster after affirming rather than taking an oath. He married Hannah Schofield (1812-82), a straw-bonnet maker, on 12 Mar. 1841 at the Registry Office in Ecclesfield. They had no children. He was a friend of Ebenezer Elliott (q.v.) and supplied material and an essay to Elliott’s biographer, January Searle, in 1852. Lister was also known as a naturalist and had interests in geology, meteorology, and ornithology. In 1884 he visited Canada and the United States and met a fellow Quaker, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). He died at Barnsley on 25 Mar. 1888, leaving an estate of £1,740. His most successful volume, The Rustic Wreath (1834), attracted over a thousand subscribers, mostly from northern towns, with over twenty MPs and landed gentry. It included his topographical and political verse, with “The Home-Expelled Britons” and “The Emigrant Mother to her First-Born” probably referring to his three brothers’ emigration in the economic depression of 1828-9. His later volumes Temperance Rhymes (1837) and Rhymes of Progress, In Aid of Education, Temperance, and Self-Relying Economy (1862) are very rare. (ODNB 30 Nov. 2024; Newsam, 163-65; The Naturalist [1888], 123-4; January Searle, Memoirs of Ebenezer Elliott [1852], 215-42, 184-211; Spencer T. Hall, Biographical Sketches of Remarkable People [1873], 230-233; Leeds Intelligencer 20 Mar. 1841; South Yorkshire Times 30 Mar. 1888; Barnsley Chronicle 7 Feb. 1863, 31 Mar. 1888) AA