ABSTRACT
Joseph Townend was born in 1806 in a rural village near Skipton, Yorkshire. His parents were Methodist shopkeepers. He went to work in a cotton factory at the age of seven, remaining a textile worker until his entry into the Manchester Infirmary in 1827. He later became a Methodist preacher and in 1851 he travelled to Australia as a missionary, returning to England 15 years later. In the class-based industrial society of 1830s Manchester, the personal patronage ties of employers to their employees could still be important in the provision of medical care. This process accords with the description of admissions to the Infirmary in J. Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society a History of Hospital Development in Manchester and its Region. A full discussion of the role of paternalism in Manchesters nineteenth-century industrial society can be found in P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: the Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England.
