Author: Lowe, John, Jr.
Biography:
LOWE, John (1766-1818: ancestry.co.uk)
Lowe published as “John Lowe, Jun.” until 1803 but was simply “John Lowe” after 1804 when his father John Lowe died, an auctioneer and chapman with premises on the Market Place in Manchester. He is probably the son of John and Martha Lowe baptised in Manchester on 9 Nov. 1766. Nothing is known of his education. Although it would have been an early marriage, he may have been the "fustian cutter" who married Jane Gibson on 30 June 1783 at St. Peter’s, Liverpool. Certainly he married before 1788 and his wife's name was Jane or some variant: Poems (1803) contains “On the Sixteenth Anniversary of Marriage” and identifies her as “Jenny.” They went on to have several children, with four infant mortalities recorded on his tombstone. The volume also contains poems on astronomy and on the shipwreck of a slave ship, subjects he had earlier dealt with in A Treatise on the Solar Creation and Universal Deluge of the Earth (1790) and Liberty and Death (1789)--with the latter giving an interesting account of a slaver’s transactions and profit and advocating that trade in products should replace slavery off the coasts of Guinea. In 1797, Lowe is on record as a silk and cotton manufacturer in Manchester, living at 8 Clowes Street. In 1804 he still had a warehouse at Market Place but later moved to York Street, Salford, where he kept a shop. He died there on 30 Jan. 1818, aged 53, and was buried at St. John’s, Manchester. Jane Lowe continued to live in York Street where she is recorded as a shopkeeper in 1821, 1825, and 1828. She died on 29 Jan. 1837, aged 72. (ancestry.co.uk 19 Nov. 2023; findmypast.com 6 June 2024; Manchester Mercury 27 Nov. 1804; William E. A. Axon, Manchester Notes and Queries 25 June 1887, 62-3; Watkins, 209; Scholes’s Manchester and Salford Directory [1794] 85 and [1797] 80; Pigot and Co.’s National Commercial Directory for 1828-29, 394) AA