Author: WILDMAN, Abraham
Biography:
WILDMAN, Abraham (1803-70: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 14 Aug. 1803 and baptised the following day at the Keighley Quaker Meeting, Yorkshire, the son of David Wildman and Susannah Naylor, who had married in March of that year. He married Hannah Wilkinson (1809-68) on 14 Apr. 1828 and had at least five daughters and three sons. A son emigrated to Australia and a daughter was disabled in a mill accident. He worked for most of his life as a woolstapler or woolsorter, was briefly an innkeeper and later a warehouseman. Although poor, he was respected and became a Poor Law guardian. He often came into conflict with workhouse governors and campaigned on the Short Hours Factory issue. In the 1851 Census the family was living at 7 Lumbry Street, Horton, but by 1861 had moved to 54 Kent Street. Abraham Holroyd (to whom we owe most of the information about him) visited him there in 1868 and on seeing him recently widowed, in impoverished condition, and with the imminent prospect of the workhouse, went to Sir Titus Salt and appealed for help. Salt gave immediate relief and offered an almshouse place for his final years. He died on 19 Mar. 1870 at 39 Almshouse, Saltaire. His Miscellaneous Poems (1829) consisted of occasional, topographical and pastoral verse and although he did not publish another volume, he continued to contribute to local newspapers where he published more political verse: "The Factory Child’s Complaint" (Leeds Patriot 13 Oct. 1832) and “The Woolcomber’s Song” (Bradford Observer 19 June 1845). A subscription was raised for the publication of his Lays of Hungary but it does seem to have been published. His later poetry remains in manuscript and is held at Keighley Local Studies Library (MS BK 185/ 1 &2). A diary written shortly before his marriage is in Wigan Public Library (Hall Collection, EHC 68/M837). His poetry survived almost solely due to the efforts of Holroyd, who included him in his Spice Islands Passed in the Sea of Reading (1859), a selection of 73 poems by Yorkshire poets, and in his Garland of Poetry (1873), and wrote the 1886 memoir "Bards of Yorkshire: Abraham Wildman." The unattributed The Weaver’s Complaint . . . By an Operative of Keighley (1834) may be his but there is no corroboration. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Oct. 2020; Bradford Observer 21 and 24 Mar. 1870; Brighouse News 27 Feb. 1886; Goodridge) AA