Χ

JOHN COLLIER. (“TIM BOBBIN")

JOHN

OHN COLLIER, much better known by his pseudonymn of Tim Bobbin, shares with his contemporary John Byrom whatever honours were gained by the contributions of Lancashire to the English literature of the eighteenth century. When worthy Dr Aikin published, some five-andseventy years ago, his "Description of the Country round Manchester," the literary biography of the region was represented by memoirs of Byrom and Collier exclusively, nor does he seem to have been guilty of any glaring oversight. Both were humorists-Collier, however, more distinctly than Byrom; both wrote prose as well as verse; and they were about the first authors of any note-Byrom slightly, Collier conspicuously to employ the broad, racy, and expressive Lancashire dialect as a literary vehicle. In the eyes of their contemporaries, Byrom was far the more celebrated of the two. The friend of Bentley, the expositor of Jacob Boehmen, in later years the wealthy owner of Kersal, would have probably been indignant at a comparison of himself with the humble schoolmaster of Milnrow. For a long time, however,

tions;

*The South Lancashire Dialect, by Thomas Heywood, Esq. (part ii. "Of Tim Bobbin and its Author"), in Chetham Miscellanies, vol. iii. (Manchester, 1862), being vol. lvii. of the Chetham Society's publicaThe Works of Tim Bobbin, Esq., with a memoir of the author by John Corry (Manchester, 1862); Edwin Waugh's Lancashire Sketches, third edition (Manchester, 1869); The Dialect of South Lancashire, or Tim Bobbin's Tummus and Meary, &c., by Samuel Bamford, second edition (London, 1854); Aikin's Description of the Country round Manchester, §"Life of John Collier, by Richard Townley, Esq.," &c., &c.

Tim Bobbin's name has been very much more familiar to the people of his native county than Byrom's. This is due partly to the fact that his most successful work was composed in the Lancashire dialect. When Byrom's verse was first admitted into a collection of the British poets, the editor peremptorily excluded his pieces in the Lancashire dialect, as has been noted in the sketch of that stenographic worthy. "The whirligig of time brings his revenges." For one reader of Byrom's metrical theosophy, there have been, and there are, thousands of Tim Bobbin's "Tummus and Meary."

At the beginning of 1710, or the close of 1709-the latter the year in which John Byrom proceeded with distinction from Merchant Taylors' to Trinity College, Cambridge -the poor village schoolmaster of Urmston, in the parish of Flixton, had a third son born to him, the John Collier afterwards famous as Tim Bobbin. The parish register of Flixton was examined of late years by Edwin Waugh-who has written from personal exploration two pleasant and picturesque papers on Tim Bobbin's birthplace and cottage respectively and Mr Waugh has made it clear that John Collier was baptized in the parish church of Flixton on the 6th January 1710, not 1709, the year given in Baines's "History of Lancashire." 1 In Baines's time, there was still

1" The origin of that mistake," says Mr Waugh (p. 96), " was evident to me with the register before my eyes. The book seems to have been very irregularly kept in those days; and the baptisms in the year 1709 are entered under a head-line, 'Baptisms in the year 1709;' but at the end of the baptisms of that year the list runs on into those of the following year, 1710, without any such head-line to divide them; and this entry of Tim's baptism being one of the first, might easily be transcribed by a hasty observer as belonging to the previous year." So far as this goes, the irregularity is more seeming than real, since, in those days, the civil and legal year did not begin until the 25th of March, and a baptism of January 1710 would fall to be registered as belonging to 1709. Mr Heywood, in his careful sketch of Collier's biography, persists throughout in representing 1708 as the year of the birth

extant the "small house,” known as "Richard o' Jones's," in which Tim Bobbin was born. It modestly fronted Urmston Hall, a quaint, gabled, wood and plaster Elizabethan mansion, which has long been a farm-house, and which still looks away over the Mersey on a wide expanse of Cheshire meadow-ground. Tim Bobbin's birth-place has disappeared; its site is occupied by one of the "four or five raw-looking, new brick cottages," tenanted by hand-loom weavers, which disappointed Mr Waugh's inquiring gaze. In spite of the hand-loom weavers and its vicinity to Manchester, the parish of Flixton is, and always has been, mainly agricultural, presenting the characteristics of a Cheshire rather than of a Lancashire district. Mr Waugh's literary pilgrimage was rewarded by few or no traditions of the Colliers. The only other distinct vestige of the residence of the Collier family in Flixton is the baptismal register of a brother of Tim Bobbin's, Nathan Collier, born in 1706.

The schoolmaster of Flixton, John Collier, Tim Bobbin's father, born in 1682, descended from a family of small landholders settled at Newton in Mottram, Cheshire. He was "Minister of Stretford" in 1706. In 1709 he is styled "Curate of Eccles." In 1716 he was "admitted to perform or discharge the office of deacon at Hollinfare (Hollin's Green)." He supported his family decently, gave them a tincture of education, and had even some thoughts of bringing up his clever young Jack for the Church, but at the age of 40 his hopes were disappointed and his efforts marred by the partial loss of his sight. There is a portrait of him, taken when he was about 50, "in a blue coat and scratch wig, sitting in a of the author of Tummus and Meary, apparently because, that is the year given for the event in the handwriting of Collier himself on the fly-leaf of an old Bible. The authority, however, of the baptismal register cannot be impeached, and this is another proof how untrustworthy are the manuscript-contributions to family history found on the fly-leaves of

old Bibles.

Q

large chair and reading a book, which he holds at a distance with both hands." The expression of the face in this portrait is said to be "acute." He died in 1739 at Newton in Mottram. Of the elder John Collier nothing more than this is known, except what Tim Bobbin, summing up his own early biography, has recorded of him in these few characteristic sentences. "In the reign of Queen Anne," quoth Tim, telling his own story in the third person, "he was a boy, and one of the nine children of a poor curate in Lancashire, whose stipend never amounted to thirty pounds a year, and consequently the family must feel the iron teeth of penury with a witness. These, indeed, were sometimes blunted by the charitable disposition of the good rector (the Rev. Mr Haddon of Wigton)"-a poet, by the way, and a friend of Byrom's. "So this T. B. lived as some other boys did, content with water-pottage, buttermilk, and jannock, till he was between 13 and 14 years of age, when Providence began to smile on him in his advancement to a pair of Dutch looms,1 when he met with treacle to his pottage, and sometimes a little in his buttermilk, or spread on his jannock. However, the reflection of his father's circumstances (which now and then start up and still edge his teeth) make him believe that Pluralists are no good Christians." The remembrance of his poor father, blind and half-starved, with nine children to bring up, and only thirty pounds a year to do it on, often recurred to Tim Bobbin when he saw reverend gentlemen around him growing obese and apoplectic on their pluralities

1 "The Dutch loom was brought to England by some Flemish artizans, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and their principal settlement was at Bolton-le-Moors. Those who adopted them had an advantage over the old English looms. The shuttle was thrown and caught by the hands of the weaver, and the Dutch looms continued to be popular until the invention of Kay's fly-shuttle, for which there was a patent in 1733."-Note by Canon Raines in Mr Heywood's Sketch, P. 43.

or otherwise, and many a gibe he shot at them with his satirical tongue and pen in after-life, as they passed him on the road. It was not only in Lancashire, or to the eyes of one who had been born and bred a poor curate's son, that these contrasts were visible and offensive in the England of the first half of the eighteenth century. Tim Bobbin had scarcely begun to make himself known as a satirist, when (in 1742) Henry Fielding produced his first novel, Joseph Andrews, with its portraits of Parson Trulliber and Parson Adams.

"Went 'prentice in May, 1722," is Tim's further account of himself, "to one Johnson, a Dutch-loom weaver, at Newton Moor, in the parish of Mottram, but, hating slavery in all shapes, I, by Divine Providence, vailing my skull-cap to the mitres, in November 1727 commenced schoolmaster at Milnrow." It seems probable that, half-way or so in his apprenticeship, he persuaded his master to cancel his indentures, and exhanged the sedentary life of a weaver for pretty constant movement as an itinerating schoolmaster. No doubt he had picked up from his father some of the elements of the pedagogic art, and had been a quick learner of what the poor schoolmaster of Flixton could teach him. No doubt, too, he had read his book more or less diligently in the intervals of business at the loom. Whether, with his then stock of knowledge, he would have been a "certificated teacher" in these days is uncertain, but in those there were no National schools, the Trullibers not having been superseded by a better and more useful clerical race; and Tim, flinging himself on the world as a travelling schoolmaster, found a tolerable welcome in the district which he selected for his perambulations. Bury, Middleton, Oldham, Rochdale, and the neighbouring villages, are said to have formed the sphere of his pedagogic operations, and at his head-quarters, wherever they may have been, he kept a night as well as a