Author: Rasbotham, Dorning
Biography:
RASBOTHAM, Dorning (1730-91: ODNB)
He was baptised on 10 May 1730 at Cross Street Presbyterian Chapel, Manchester, the son of Peter Rosbotham and Hannah Dorning, co-heiress of John Dorning, of Birch House, Farnworth, near Bolton. They married at Chester in September 1719 and Birch House and other estates later passed to the Rasbotham family. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School. He married Sarah Bayley on 24 July 1754 at St. Peter’s, Liverpool. They had three daughters and two sons. He was a magistrate and chairman of the quarter sessions at Manchester for 25 years. In 1769 he became High Sheriff of Lancashire. In addition to Codrus (1774), a verse tragedy which had only local success, he wrote Verses… at the Breaking-up of the Free Grammar School in Manchester (1782), which is not listed here for reasons of length. (It was published anonymously but the dedication to Charles Lawson, the headmaster is dated Birch House, Farnworth, Nov. 25, 1782.) He is thought to have written other verses but they remain untraced. Various sources (including DNB and ODNB) list A Dissuasive from Popular Rioting Directed against Mechanical Manufacturing Improvements (1779) but no copy has ever been located. Scholes (1886) listed a work Disorderly Conduct of the People (1779) which is probably the same, but he had never seen a copy. Rasbotham was also a painter and etcher. There are etchings of a view of Old Blackfriar’s Bridge and St. Mary’s Church and a portrait of the poet John Byrom in the National Portrait Gallery. He had extensive antiquarian interests and assembled materials for a history of Lancashire which his family later gave to Edward Baines, MP. He died at Birch House, Farnworth, near Bolton, Lancashire, on 7 Nov. 1791, with Thomas Barnes DD, a leading Manchester dissenter, writing a memorial tribute. (ODNB 7 Oct. 2023; Edward Baines and W. R. Whatton, History of . . . Lancaster [1836] 3: 43; J. F. Smith, The Admission Register of the Manchester School [1866], 162, 189; GM Nov. 1791, 1068; James C. Scholes, Bolton Bibliography [1886], 59-60) AA