Author: Nicholson, Thomas
Biography:
NICHOLSON, Thomas (1806-63: ancestry.com)
Internal evidence provides some clues to the identity of the author of Visions of the Muse. It is dated from Hunslet, Leeds, Yorkshire, and published in Leeds. Many of the poems refer to local sites, such as the “Lamentation of the River Aire” which graphically describes its pollution. Some were inspired by events within the family, notably the elegy on the death of his mother in 1824. And many of them allude to or explicitly imitate the poets Nicholson admired: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the more contemporary Burns, Wolcot, and Byron (qq.v.). There is at least one quotation in French. Thomas Nicholson was baptised at Hunslet on 20 Apr. 1806, the eldest of at least three children of Rachel (Brown) and Robert Nicholson, who had been married in Leeds on 3 Sept. 1805. Rachel Nicholson of Hunslet was buried in Leeds on 9 Sept. 1824, aged 44. Nicholson was a wire worker who spent most of his life in Manchester, contributed to periodicals, published three further collections of poetry (1849, 1852, 1857), and left a manuscript novel, The Miser’s Will, on his death in 1863. He taught himself French well enough to teach it at the Ancoats Lyceum in Manchester. On 11 Oct. 1840 he married Margaret Matilda Nimmo (1823-72) at St. Mary’s, Manchester; they had eleven children. He died of "congestive apoplexy" on 2 June 1863 during a visit to his son Robert in Leeds, and was buried in Leeds General Cemetery. (ancestry.com 2 Mar. 2024, 11 May 2025; findmypast.com 2 Mar. 2024; R. W. Procter, Memorials of Bygone Manchester [1880], 207-8; GRO death cert.; information from AA) HJ