Author: Wright, Thomas
Biography:
WRIGHT, Thomas (1736-97: Halifax Books)
He was born on 27 Jan. 1736 at Mulcture Hall, Halifax, Yorkshire, and baptised on 24 Feb. at St. John’s, Halifax, the third of four children of John Wright (1710-40) and Elizabeth Cordingley (1711-38), who had married in 1731. His father assisted his father-in-law, Thomas Cordingley, a mill owner, and the extended family lived at Mulcture Hall. After the deaths of his parents he was left in the care of his maternal grandparents. He was left a small estate at Bowling Green near Bradford in trust by his grandfather in 1742 and then cared for by his grandmother, Martha Cordingley. On her death in 1746, he went to live with an aunt at Birkenshaw, near Leeds. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and then put to trade as a white-cloth maker; he also learned weaving. He later became an inspector of woollens. He read the Bible at seven or eight but his grandson’s claim that he could recite the whole of Paradise Lost by heart in adulthood is probably Victorian code for a prodigious memory. He married Lydia Birkhead (1747-71) on 19 Nov. 1766 at Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, in a runaway or “Gretna Green” marriage, after which they lived at Lower Blacup , near Cleckheaton, for about fourteen years and had seven children with several infant deaths. Lydia died of consumption 22 Oct. 1777, aged thirty. He then married Alicia Pinder at Birstall on 4 Nov. 1781. They lived at Birkenshaw, where a further six children were born. Wright died of typhus on 30 Jan. 1801, aged sixty-five, and was buried at the White Chapel, Birstall. His Wesleyan Methodist views, sympathetic to Arminianism and critical of Calvinism and Predestination, were articulated in A Modern Familiar Religious Conversation (1778) and the posthumously published second edition (1812). Further poems critical of Calvinism were published in the appendix to his Autobiography (1864) which also included poems on the deaths of his children. (Halifax Books, 81-83; Thomas Wright [grandson], ed., Autobiography of Thomas Wright, of Birkenshaw [1864]; ancestry.co.uk 24 June 2023; findmypast.co.uk 24 June 2023) AA