Ainsworth

Ainsworth, WILLIAM HARRISON, was born in Manchester, February 4, 1805, and educated at the grammar-school. A solicitor's son, in his seventeenth year he was articulated to a solicitor; and on his father's death in 1824, came up to London to complete his legal studies. Two years later, however, he married a publisher's daughter, and himself turned publisher for eighteen months. He had contributed some articles to magazines prior to 1822, so that his first-born was not Sir John Chiver-ton (1826), an anonymous novel, bepraised by Scott, but partly, it seems now, the work of a Mr Aston. Anyhow, his earliest hit was Rookwood (1834), with its vivid description of Dick Turpin's ride to York. By 1881, a period of close upon half a century, he had published no fewer than thirty-nine novels. Several of these appeared originally in Bentley's Miscellany, Ainsworth's Magazine (1842-54), and the New Monthly, of which he was successively editor; and seven of them were illustrated by Cruikshank—viz. Rookwood, Jack Sheppard (1839), Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Miser's Daughter (1842), Windsor Castle (1843), and St James's (1844). To these may be added his Crichton (1837), Old St Paul's (1841), and Lancashire Witches (1848), as possessing some intrinsic claim to literary merit. He died at Reigate, January 3, 1882.