ABSTRACT
William Harrison Ainsworth was born the son of a successful solicitor in Manchester, in 1805, the year of Trafalgar. He was sent to Manchester Grammar School, and developed a natural talent for writing. One of his early dramas was printed in Arliss’s Magazine, and he also wrote for the Manchester Iris, the Edinburgh Magazine, and the London Magazine. The streets were crowded with carriages, carts, vans, and waggons, and with jovial-looking farmers on horseback and grinning yokels on foot, while Harrison Ainsworth, the popular novelist, thought it not beneath his dignity to pose as president over the select assemblage, crammed into the little pill-box called a town-hall.’ In fact the confident optimism of Wilkie Collins, in his letter to William Tinsley foretelling the swing to popularity of his novels once they had had time to get talked about, was justified by events on that occasion.
