Joseph Adshead Explained

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

Life

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

Prisons

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

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 and References

  1. Book: Paul A. Pickering. Alex Tyrell. The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League. 13 September 2000. Bloomsbury. 978-0-7185-0218-8. 273.
  2. Alan Powers, 'Architects I Have Known': The Architectural Career of S. D. Adshead, Architectural History Vol. 24, (1981), pp. 103–123, at p. 120 note 15. Published by: SAHGB Publications Limited. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1568402
  3. Book: Maurice Spiers. Victoria Park, Manchester: A Nineteenth-century Suburb in Its Social and Administrative Context. registration. 1 January 1976. Manchester University Press. 978-0-7190-1333-1. 13 note 1.
  4. Book: The Legal Observer, Or, Journal of Jurisprudence. 1839. J. Richards. 350.
  5. Book: Paul A. Pickering. Alex Tyrell. The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League. 13 September 2000. Bloomsbury. 978-0-7185-0218-8. 229.
  6. Book: Maurice Spiers. Victoria Park, Manchester: A Nineteenth-century Suburb in Its Social and Administrative Context. registration. 1 January 1976. Manchester University Press. 978-0-7190-1333-1. 5.
  7. Wilson, George (1808-1870). Wilson, George (1808–1870). 62.
  8. Book: Thomas Austin Bullock. Bradshaw's Illustrated Guide to Manchester. 1857. 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. Book: William Lloyd Garrison. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: No Union with the Slaveholders, 1841–1849. 1973. Harvard University Press. 978-0-674-52662-4. 16–.
  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. Book: John V. Pickstone. Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. 1 January 1985. Manchester University Press. 978-0-7190-1809-1. 108–9.
  14. Book: John V. Pickstone. Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. 1 January 1985. Manchester University Press. 978-0-7190-1809-1. 102.
  15. Book: John V. Pickstone. Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946. 1 January 1985. Manchester University Press. 978-0-7190-1809-1. 135 note 34.
  16. Book: The Monthly (alphabetical) record of births, deaths, & marriages (and Alphabetical list of estates of deceased persons).. 164.
  17. Book: Edward Tyas Cook. Edward Tyas Cook. Rosalind Nightingale Nash. The Life of Florence Nightingale. 1925. Library of Alexandria. 978-1-4655-3954-0. 478.
  18. [Wilfrid Hugh Chesson]
  19. Book: Joseph Adshead. Prison Discipline: The Fallacies of The Times. 1844.
  20. Book: Francis Lieber. 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. 2002. Univ of South Carolina Press. 978-1-57003-447-3. 117.
  21. Book: Paul Mason. Captured by the Media. 13 May 2013. Routledge. 978-1-134-00875-9. 116.
  22. Book: Joseph Adshead. Prisons and Prisoners. 1845. Longmans, Brown, Green, and Longman.
  23. Book: Randolph Shipley Klein. Science and Society in Early America: Essays in Honor of Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. 1 January 1986. American Philosophical Society. 978-0-87169-166-8. 244.
  24. Book: Charles Dickens. The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume 3. 1842–1843. 22 August 1974. Oxford University Press. 978-0-19-812474-0. 125 note.
  25. Book: Michele Lise Tarter. Richard Bell. Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. 2012. University of Georgia Press. 978-0-8203-4120-0. 242.
  26. Book: Charles Sumner. Charles Sumner. The Works of Charles Sumner. 1870. Lee and Shepard. 507–8.
  27. Book: Joseph Adshead. Our Present Gaol System Deeply Depraving to the Prisoner and a Positive Evil to the Community: Some Remedies Proposed. Falkner, Printers. 1847.
  28. Book: John Gascoigne (PhD). The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. 7 June 2002. Cambridge University Press. 978-0-521-80343-4. 132.
  29. Book: Manchester Statistical Society (Manchester, England). Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society. 1854. Manchester Statistical Society. 67.
  30. Book: The Literary and Educational Year Book. 1859. 173.
  31. Book: Meliora. 1859. Partridge and Company. 115.
  32. Book: Julius Carlebach. Caring for Children in Trouble. 21 August 2013. Routledge. 978-1-136-24914-3. 44.
  33. Book: Joseph Adshead. A Circumstantial Narrative of the Wreck of the Rothsay Castle Steampacket: On Her Passage from Liverpool to Beaumaris, August 17, 1831 .... 1834. Hamilton, Adams, and Company. 310. 9780784404539.
  34. Book: Joseph Black. Broadview Anthology of British Literature, The Concise Edition, Volume B. Broadview Press. 1597–. GGKEY:1TFFGS4YFLT. etal.
  35. Howard, Richard Baron. 28.
  36. Book: Ann Bermingham. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. 1989. University of California Press. 978-0-520-06623-6. 227 note 61.
  37. Book: John R. Kellett. The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. 6 December 2012. Routledge. 978-1-135-68087-9. 150 note.
  38. Book: Joseph Adshead. The Progress of Religious Sentiment. 1852. s.n..
  39. Book: George Catlin. Joseph Adshead. Steam Raft: Suggested as a Means of Security to Human Life Upon the Ocean. 1860. G. Falkner. 3.

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