Author: Rushton, Edward
Biography:
RUSHTON, Edward (1756–1814: ODNB)
Born in Liverpool on 13 Nov. 1756 to Thomas Rushton and his wife Sarah Tatlock, Edward Rushton enlisted as a naval apprentice at the age of ten, distinguishing himself on transatlantic voyages and in the West Indian service. In 1773, on his first commission on a slaving ship out of Liverpool, he was cited for mutinous insubordination for protesting the conditions of the enslaved passengers, and at a stopover in Dominica he was blinded by an eye infection. Sent to live with his aunt in 1776, he paid neighbors to read poetry to him in the evenings and began publishing oppositional poems based on his firsthand experiences of the slave trade and the American revolution, eventually bringing out The Dismember’d Empire (1782). In 1783 Rushton moved into independent accommodation and struck out in publishing. For three decades he would pursue an irregular career as a radical literary figure and Roscoe Circle reformer in the slaving port of Liverpool as a publisher, public speaker, and editor of and contributor to newspapers. He and Isabella Rain secured a licence to marry on 2 Oct. 1785 and married two days later; they went on to have five children. In 1787 he published an elegy on Thomas Chatterton which was admired by a young Coleridge (qq.v.) as well as his major abolitionist work, West-Indian Eclogues. In 1792 he began collaborating with the printer John M’Creery, who published Rushton’s poetry as well as charity pamphlets for the Royal School for the Blind that Rushton had founded in 1791. Rushton’s widely-reviewed Poems (1806) was excoriated by the anti-Jacobin press but found admirers among liberal and dissenting readerships. In later years, Rushton remained prolific in a wide variety of regional societies and networks; he also underwent several harrowing surgeries that eventually restored partial vision to one eye, and by 1807 he was able to see his wife and children for the first time, to read, and to travel independently. His death on 22 Nov. 1814 was commemorated in Liverpool, Belfast, and London, though a complete edition of his poems would not materialize until 1824. His eldest son Edward (1795–1857) became a Liverpool politician and took up Rushton's bookselling business, continuing to publish works in support of radical causes. (ODNB 29 July 2022; Paul Baines, “Introduction,” in The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton [2021]; findmypast.com 6 Jan. 2023) CC