William Roscoe (1753-1831) was a
significant figure in several walks of life but a dominant one in the civic life of
Liverpool. He merits attention as a poet, biographer, collector, patron of the
arts, banker, abolitionist, prison reformer, politician, and botanist, but it was
his personal character that drew from his contemporaries what Washington Irving
described in The Sketch Book (1819-20) as an “involuntary feeling of
veneration.” How was it possible for a largely self-taught man, an
inn-keeper’s son, to achieve so much? Henry Roscoe says that his father owed
his success less to genius than “to qualities which every one possesses, and
which, if duly cultivated, will lead to the same results" (2:429). These he
identifies as energy, integrity, and benevolence. But as Irving recognized, Roscoe
was an exceptional person living in extraordinary times.
Roscoe began his career as a
Liverpool attorney. He was allied by marriage and professional connections to
prominent mercantile families in the rising city and in the 1780s and 90s made a
large fortune, presumably by canny investments. He retired from his legal career at
the age of forty-three and shortly afterwards purchased Allerton Hall, the estate
where his father had once been a butler. He then began a second career as a banker,
but when his firm stopped payments in during the financial crisis of 1816 Roscoe
was financially ruined. After becoming became a bankrupt in 1820 he spent much his
remaining life attempting to support himself by producing an edition of Pope and
new editions of his biographies of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Leo X.
He prepared for his literary
career by teaching himself languages and acquiring a taste for books and the fine
arts. As his fortune grew he collected incunabula and Italian art, taking a
particular interest in the Florentine merchant prince whose career he would
emulate. The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1796) made Roscoe famous, not
only in Britain but in Europe and America. Roscoe’s wealth and fame enabled
him to take an active role in public life; he was a founder of the Liverpool
Athenaeum in 1797 and the Liverpool Botanic Garden in 1803. He was elected to
Parliament in 1806 as a Foxite Whig, but finding practical politics not to his
taste (no Lorenzo in that respect) he pursued the issues that mattered most to
him—abolition, parliamentary reform, and prison management—in a long series of
pamphlets. Roscoe was a fearless supporter of liberty, an outspoken pacifist, and
ardent controversialist.
For Roscoe wealth and literary
pursuits were subordinate to the greater ends of civic life. He patronized the
painter Henry Fuseli, the sculptor John Gibson, and a host of lesser worthies. With
his friends James Currie, Edward Rushton, and William Shepherd, Roscoe was a leader
in Liverpool radical politics. As a young man he had attended lectures the
Warrington Academy, and John Aikin and his family were lifelong friends. Roscoe was
a prominent figure among the Unitarians and was closely affiliated with Quaker
abolitionists. His early, courageous opposition to the slave-trade made him enemies
in Liverpool but also aristocratic friends who were valuable to his civic
ambitions. He carried on an extensive correspondence with botanists in England,
scholars in Europe, and jurists in the United States. His social, familial, and
financial connections with Liverpool merchants, though not commented on by his
biographer, may have been the most important of his associations.
G. K. Chesterton speaks of
“the whited sepulchre of the purely official biography” (preface to
Forster’s Life of Dickens, 1927) and cold marble seems an apt metaphor
for Henry Roscoe’s unhappy and obsequious biography. The best that can be
said for it is that it is accurate as far as it goes. A youngest son, Henry Roscoe
(1800-1836), like Cuthbert Southey, had to write the life of a man he had known
only in old age. The elderly Roscoe is projected onto the more youthful man,
resulting in a biography bereft of narrative, conflict, and intellectual
development. “In taking even a cursory review of Mr. Roscoe’s life,”
Henry writes, “the striking coherency of his opinions and conduct at every
period of it will be visible” (2:429). But the first fifty years of his
father’s life are very slenderly documented. It is difficult to imagine the
retirement-loving scholar known to the biographer taking the risks that the younger
and more ambitious man obviously took.
In 1833 few persons were alive who
could have known William Roscoe in his formative years. William Shepherd had known
him in the 1790s but there is no indication that Shepherd was consulted. Henry
Roscoe’s chief source was the physician Thomas Stewart Traill who first met
Roscoe in 1806; Traill’s 1832 memoir became the template for a
life-and-letters that is reticent even by nineteenth-century standards. Not one
personal anecdote of Roscoe is related. Roscoe’s opinions of books and
writers are omitted from the correspondence. Apart from the occasional pious
sonnet, domestic life is placed off limits; the biographer even suppresses the
names of his own brothers and sisters. Roscoe’s places of residence are not
described, nor the gardens or pictures in which he took such pleasure.
Roscoe’s best-known poem—The Butterfly’s Ball and the
Grasshopper’s Feast (1807)—goes unmentioned, presumably because it
would seem inconsistent with the “striking coherency” of the
poet’s sober character.
A comparison of the correspondence
as given by Henry Roscoe with that published in the 1832 Memoir and
Correspondence of the late Sir James Edward Smith suggests that Roscoe
could be a livelier correspondent than this sententious biography suggests. It is
true that Henry Roscoe was handicapped by the fact that many of his father’s
literary correspondents were still alive in 1833, which might explain why no
account is given of his acquaintances with Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, Maria
Edgeworth, Bernard Barton, John Wilson, and James Hogg. But even were these letters
available for publication it is doubtful that Henry Roscoe would have made much use
of them. The few excerpted letters to Jane Roscoe from London show, as might be
imagined, that Roscoe, for all his benevolent dignity, took pleasure mixing in the
company of others.
The Life of William Roscoe
was well received by the reviewers—mostly for the sake of its venerable subject,
though the biographer was sometimes praised for his filial piety. It was reprinted
once, in Boston in 1883. Henry Roscoe, a barrister, died of consumption in 1836.
David Hill Radcliffe
