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Joseph Adshead

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Joseph Adshead (1800–1861) was an English merchant, reformer and pamphleteer from Manchester.

Life

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Born in Ross, Herefordshire, Adshead worked as an estate agent and merchant.[1] He settled in Manchester around 1820.[2]

In 1835 he was part of the consortium developing Victoria Park, Manchester.[3] He was declared bankrupt in 1839, described as a "wholesale hosier".[4][5] In 1839 also, he went onto the Council of the Anti-Cornlaw League.[6] In 1838 the Night Asylum, a homeless shelter in Henry Street, Manchester, was founded by Adshead and George Wilson of the League, and Adshead continued to act as its treasurer.[7][8]

In 1840–1 Adshead was involved with the British India Society, and moved in abolitionist circles. He became secretary of a branch, the Northern Central British India Society, after a visit to Manchester by Joseph Pease. He had worked with George Thompson at the end of 1840 to see its journal The British Indian Advocate issued.[9] He was in the US shortly afterwards, calling on James and Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia on 16 February 1841.[10] In March he sailed back from Boston, where he knew William Lloyd Garrison, with a letter destined for Elizabeth Pease.[11]

Adshead was one of the defendant directors in the landmark case Foss v Harbottle (1843) 67 ER 189, which established the precedent that where a wrong is alleged to have been done to a company, the proper claimant is the company itself.

Adshead became a member of Manchester Corporation, serving as Alderman for St. Anne's Ward.[2][12] He also took up public causes in the health sector. He supported the Health of Towns Association, and homoeopathy.[13] He advocated the rebuilding out of town of the Manchester Lunatic Asylum, in the early 1840s when its future was in play.[14] At the end of his life he was lobbying for a convalescent hospital in the Manchester area.[15] He died on 15 February 1861, at Withington.[16] He was a correspondent of Florence Nightingale, a contact through Richard Cobden, and after his death she wrote in a letter that he was "my best pupil".[17] The Bottle, George Cruikshank's set of eight temperance engravings, was dedicated to Adshead.[18]

Works

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Exchange Ward, Manchester, from Joseph Adshead's Twenty-Four Illustrated Maps of the Township of Manchester (1851)

Prisons

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  • Prison Discipline: The Fallacies of The Times (1844)[19]

As a penal reformer, Adshead supported the system of Francis Lieber,[20] and defended the separate system.[21] In Prisons and Prisoners (1845),[22] he described the Eastern State Penitentiary.[23] This work also contained an attack on the views of prisons expressed by Charles Dickens.[24] Adshead argued, influentially, that what Dickens had written in his American Notes (1842) on the "Pennsylvania system" was fiction, and could not be taken seriously as commentary.[25] He also characterised the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Boston Prison Discipline Society (1843) on the matters at issue as a "flagrant instance of trickery".[26] A sequel was Our Present Gaol System Deeply Depraving to the Prisoner and a Positive Evil to the Community: Some Remedies Proposed (1847).[27] In it Adshead commented favourably on the positive effect of the separate system on prisoners who were then to be transported to Port Phillip in Australia.[28]

On Juvenile Criminals, Reformatories, and the Means of Rendering the Perishing and Dangerous Classes serviceable to the State (1856), paper given to the Manchester Statistical Society.[29] Adshead gave a further paper to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science meeting in Liverpool in 1858 on "Reformatory and industrial schools, their comparative economy".[30] He considered the finances of ten each of reformatories, ragged schools and industrial schools.[31] Adshead was critical of Parkhurst, the prison for young offenders, though he did not take the same view of it as Mary Carpenter.[32]

Other works

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  • A Circumstantial Narrative of the Wreck of the Rothsay Castle Steampacket: On Her Passage from Liverpool to Beaumaris, 17 August 1831 (1834)[33] The Rothsay Castle was shipwrecked at the east end of the Menai Straits.
  • Distress in Manchester (1842).[34] This work contained a contribution from Richard Baron Howard on contagious disease.[35] Adshead made a connection between prostitution and social change driven by industrial development.[36]
  • Twenty-Four Illustrated Maps of the Township of Manchester (1851);[37] available online.
  • The Progress of Religious Sentiment (1852)[38]

Adshead wrote an introduction to George Catlin's Steam Raft: Suggested as a means of security to human life upon the ocean (1860).[39]

Notes

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  1. ^ Paul A. Pickering; Alex Tyrell (13 September 2000). The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League. Bloomsbury. p. 273. ISBN 978-0-7185-0218-8.
  2. ^ a b Powers, Alan (1981). "'Architects I Have Known': The Architectural Career of S. D. Adshead". Architectural History. 24: 103–164. doi:10.2307/1568402. ISSN 0066-622X.
  3. ^ Maurice Spiers (1 January 1976). Victoria Park, Manchester: A Nineteenth-century Suburb in Its Social and Administrative Context. Manchester University Press. p. 13 note 1. ISBN 978-0-7190-1333-1.
  4. ^ The Legal Observer, Or, Journal of Jurisprudence. J. Richards. 1839. p. 350.
  5. ^ Paul A. Pickering; Alex Tyrell (13 September 2000). The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League. Bloomsbury. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-7185-0218-8.
  6. ^ Maurice Spiers (1 January 1976). Victoria Park, Manchester: A Nineteenth-century Suburb in Its Social and Administrative Context. Manchester University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-7190-1333-1.
  7. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1900). "Wilson, George (1808–1870)" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 62. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  8. ^ Thomas Austin Bullock (1857). Bradshaw's Illustrated Guide to Manchester. pp. 48–9.
  9. ^ Anna M. Stoddart, Elizabeth Pease Nichol (1899), p. 111 and pp. 122–3; archive.org (1) and archive.org (2).
  10. ^ Anna Davis Hallowell (ed.), James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (1884), p. 194; archive.org.
  11. ^ William Lloyd Garrison (1973). The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: No Union with the Slaveholders, 1841–1849. Harvard University Press. pp. 16–. ISBN 978-0-674-52662-4.
  12. ^ William E. A. Axon (ed.), The Annals of Manchester: a chronological record from the earliest times to the end of 1885 (1886)p. 283.
  13. ^ John V. Pickstone (1 January 1985). Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. Manchester University Press. pp. 108–9. ISBN 978-0-7190-1809-1.
  14. ^ John V. Pickstone (1 January 1985). Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. Manchester University Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-7190-1809-1.
  15. ^ John V. Pickstone (1 January 1985). Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. Manchester University Press. pp. 135 note 34. ISBN 978-0-7190-1809-1.
  16. ^ The Monthly (alphabetical) record of births, deaths, & marriages (and Alphabetical list of estates of deceased persons). p. 164.
  17. ^ Edward Tyas Cook; Rosalind Nightingale Nash (1925). The Life of Florence Nightingale. Library of Alexandria. p. 478. ISBN 978-1-4655-3954-0.
  18. ^ Wilfrid Hugh Chesson, George Cruikshank (1908), p. 256;archive.org.
  19. ^ Joseph Adshead (1844). Prison Discipline: The Fallacies of The Times.
  20. ^ Francis Lieber (2002). Like a Sponge Thrown into Water: Francis Lieber's European Travel Journal of 1844–1845: a Lively Tour Through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Bohemia. Univ of South Carolina Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-57003-447-3.
  21. ^ Paul Mason (13 May 2013). Captured by the Media. Routledge. p. 116. ISBN 978-1-134-00875-9.
  22. ^ Joseph Adshead (1845). Prisons and Prisoners. Longmans, Brown, Green, and Longman.
  23. ^ Randolph Shipley Klein (1 January 1986). Science and Society in Early America: Essays in Honor of Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. American Philosophical Society. p. 244. ISBN 978-0-87169-166-8.
  24. ^ Charles Dickens (22 August 1974). The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume 3. 1842–1843. Oxford University Press. pp. 125 note. ISBN 978-0-19-812474-0.
  25. ^ Michele Lise Tarter; Richard Bell (2012). Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. University of Georgia Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-8203-4120-0.
  26. ^ Charles Sumner (1870). The Works of Charles Sumner. Lee and Shepard. pp. 507–8.
  27. ^ Joseph Adshead (1847). Our Present Gaol System Deeply Depraving to the Prisoner and a Positive Evil to the Community: Some Remedies Proposed. Falkner, Printers.
  28. ^ John Gascoigne (PhD) (7 June 2002). The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Cambridge University Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-521-80343-4.
  29. ^ Manchester Statistical Society (Manchester, England) (1854). Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society. Manchester Statistical Society. p. 67.
  30. ^ The Literary and Educational Year Book. 1859. p. 173.
  31. ^ Meliora. Partridge and Company. 1859. p. 115.
  32. ^ Julius Carlebach (21 August 2013). Caring for Children in Trouble. Routledge. p. 44. ISBN 978-1-136-24914-3.
  33. ^ Joseph Adshead (1834). A Circumstantial Narrative of the Wreck of the Rothsay Castle Steampacket: On Her Passage from Liverpool to Beaumaris, August 17, 1831 ... Hamilton, Adams, and Company. p. 310. ISBN 9780784404539.
  34. ^ Joseph Black (ed.). Broadview Anthology of British Literature, The Concise Edition, Volume B. Broadview Press. pp. 1597–. GGKEY:1TFFGS4YFLT.
  35. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1891). "Howard, Richard Baron" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 28. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  36. ^ Ann Bermingham (1989). Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. University of California Press. pp. 227 note 61. ISBN 978-0-520-06623-6.
  37. ^ John R. Kellett (6 December 2012). The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. Routledge. p. 150 note. ISBN 978-1-135-68087-9.
  38. ^ Joseph Adshead (1852). The Progress of Religious Sentiment. s.n.
  39. ^ George Catlin; Joseph Adshead (1860). Steam Raft: Suggested as a Means of Security to Human Life Upon the Ocean. G. Falkner. p. 3.
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