Author: Shackleton, Abraham
Biography:
SHACKLETON, Abraham (1752-1818: ODNB)
He was the grandson of Abraham Shackleton, the Quaker founder in 1726 of the school at Ballitore, County Kildare. His father was Richard Shackleton, master of the school, poet, and friend of Edmund Burke (who attended Ballitore school). His mother, Richard Shackleton’s first wife, was Elizabeth Fuller who died in 1754 when Abraham was two. Richard Shackleton married Elizabeth Carleton in 1755; they had four children including Mary Leadbeater (q.v.). Abraham entered Ballitore school in 1756 and eventually became a teacher and, in 1779, master. He married Lydia Mellor in 1779; they had nine children but just five survived their father. Abraham Shackleton was an abolitionist and pacifist who acted on his principles: he stopped using all products of slave labour and refused to teach Latin authors “who recommend in seducing language the Illusions of Love and the abominable Trade of War.” The latter decision briefly caused the school’s closure (the Latin texts were a requirement for university entrance), and he worked as a miller and farmer. Although he was elected a Quaker elder, his liberal beliefs and support for Hannah Barnard, a progressive American Quaker who visited Ireland, led over time to his separation from the Society of Friends. Other Irish Quakers followed his lead but Shackleton came to regret a division which had weakened the Society in Ireland. In later years he wrote and occasionally published essays and his one book of verse. After his death at home on 2 Aug. 1818 he was interred in the Ballitore Quaker burial ground. (ODNB 23 Nov. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 23 Nov. 2021; Saunders’s Newsletter 25 July 1789) SR