Author: Nicholson, John
Biography:
NICHOLSON, John (1790-1843: ODNB)
pseudonym the Airedale Poet
Born on 29 Nov. 1790 at Weardley, West Yorkshire, he was the eldest son of a woolsorter, Thomas Nicholson, and his wife, Martha Whitley. He was taught desultorily by a broom maker at Romalds Moor and systematically at the Bingley Free Grammar School under the Rev. Dr Richard Hartley. At a young age, he apprenticed at the mill in which his father was employed. Several months after his 11 July 1810 marriage, his young wife, Mary Driver, died after delivering twins. He then briefly itinerated as a Methodist preacher but soon resumed working as a woolsorter and comber, first at Shipley Fields Mill and then at Harden Beck. By his second marriage— to Martha Wild on 13 Feb. 1813—he had nine children. Nicholson came to local notice with the 1820 Bradford theatre production of his The Robber of the Alps. That success, the 1821 publication of The Siege of Bradford, and that of Airedale in Ancient Times in 1825, attracted his first patron, J. G. Horsfall, a Bradford factory owner. Though Horsfall’s cotton mill was attacked by Luddites, Nicholson wrote in support of the factory movement. In 1832, poverty drove him to violate his convictions. (He had been earning 10s per week and needed money to support his large family; the Royal Literary Fund twice granted him £10, in 1828 and 1835.) He accepted a commission from the editor of the Leed’s Mercury, Edward Baines, to write in opposition to the Factory Act. The resulting poem, The Factory Mother’s Child, produced a retort, The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply, by a Leeds cloth finisher, James Ross (q.v.). Nicholson spent several years in London and the provinces hawking his publications. His publishers’ bankruptcy, however, caused him in 1833 to return to factory employment, now at Bradford at Saltaire Mills. He lost his life in 1843 near Shipley when on the evening of 13 Apr., in a drunken state, he fell into the swollen river Aire. Though he made it to the river’s edge, he died on the following morning, of hypothermia. Several hundred mourners attended his 18 Apr. funeral at Binley All Saints. Later that year, supporters funded the publication of his collected poems for the benefit of his wife and his surviving children. In 1845, the RLF granted his widow £40. (ODNB 27 May 2024; RLF file 656; Bradford Observer, 20 Apr. 1843) JC