Author: SHELDRAKE, William
Biography:
SHELDRAKE, William (fl 1789)
A modern writer has aptly described the poet as “a local manufacturer of doggerel” (Pool). He was a resident of Turton, Lancashire, a village 20 miles from Manchester. Two years prior to the publication of A Picturesque Description of Turton Fair. A Poem (1789), he suffered “six shattered ribs” from an encounter with ruffians at the Turton Fair. No other information about him has come to light. He might be the person of that name who died at Cheetham, Manchester, at age 47 in 1819. That man’s wife, Alice Sowe of Manchester, whom he married in 1790, died a pauper at age 86 in Manchester in 1852. They had a single child, also William, born in 1813. (ancestry.com 20 Oct. 2024; R. Pool, Popular Leisure and the Music Hall in Nineteenth-Century Bolton [1982], 13) JC