Author: Rayson, John
Biography:
RAYSON, John (1802-59: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Warwick, three miles from Carlisle, Cumberland, on 5 Nov. 1802 and baptised on 10 July 1803 at Irthington, the son of Isaac Raison (sic), farmer and small estate owner, and his wife Ann Story. He was educated locally. His father intended him and his two brothers to learn agriculture on the family estate but he objected and moved to Carlisle where he was probably apprenticed to a draper. He wrote his first poems there and contributed to the periodical The Citizen. He then moved to London where he tried and failed at business and contributed to the magazine Apollo. After returning to Cumbria in 1822, he taught in various schools and a Sunday school and became a strong advocate for temperance, writing several poems on the subject. He resigned to take up the administration of a newly-established Mendicity Institution--intended to assist and control beggars--in Carlisle but it failed after about three years. He became collector of rates for Botchergate until 1845 when he was appointed assistant overseer at the Penrith Union, superintendent of vagrants and inspector of nuisances, and Clerk to the magistrates of Leath ward. As with the Mendicity Institution, he became the “victim of designing knaves” and resigned in 1849. He married Barbara Graham (1807-70), the daughter of a local stone mason, at Penrith in 1848. There was no issue. They moved to Beacon-side, Penrith, where he worked as an accountant and clerk, occasionally writing for local papers. He died at Penrith on 12 Sept. 1859, aged 56, from heart disease. He is primarily known as a dialect poet but his social protest poems such as “The Bread Tax” and “The Petition of the Women of Cumberland” are worth another look. (“Memoir” in Miscellaneous Poems and Ballads [1858], ix-xii; ancestry.co.uk 25 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 25 Nov. 2022; Carlisle Journal 20 June 1840, 20 Oct. and 3 Nov. 1848, 13 Sept. and 14 Oct. 1859; thesalamancacorpus.com) AA