ABSTRACT
Henry Clarke was born in Salford, England in 1743, and as a boy attendee the town grammar school of neighboring Manchester. The distinguished grammar school attended by Henry Clarke had probably originated in a collegiate church founded in Manchester in 1420. Two early sixteenth-century endowments had yielded a successful free school patterned after St. Paul’s, despite the statutory adoption of the Stanbridge Latin grammar briefly a serious rival to the tradition originated there by Colet and Lily. Mathematics including logarithms and surveying applications had been taught at Manchester since early Restoration days, and by Clarke’s time optical experimentation using a telescope was a staple part of a rich curriculum. The school enjoyed remarkably balanced diversity in the social backgrounds of the boys and the occupations they would later pursue.
