Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

organist at Keighley, Leeds, and Halifax churches and composer of religious music, chiefly psalm settings. His hasty departure from Leeds was apparently due to business failures (“particularly in the sale of Pianofortes, never being able to make the price they cost me,” Leeds Intelligencer , 14 Aug 1838) rather than his private life (his earlier Gretna Green marriage in 1823 was repeated in the parish church). His two visits to Haworth in 1834, one to inaugurate the new organ in St Michael’s Church, had a great effect on Charlotte and Branwell, who gave him cameo roles in the former’s “My Angria and the Angrians” (EW, v. 2, pt 2, pp. 251–3) and the latter’s “Angria and the Angrians”, where Branwell characterizes him as “the most wandering and easy minded being extant” (WPBB, v. 2, p. 217). He died of consumption. ... log in or subscribe to read full text