35 Facts About William Gaskell

William Gaskell was an English Unitarian minister, charity worker and pioneer in the education of the working class.

Unlike many of his Manchester contemporaries, William Gaskell always favoured social and educational work above political lobbying for free trade or factory reform.

William Gaskell was born in Latchford, a suburb of Warrington, the eldest of six children.

William Gaskell's father, William, was a sailcloth manufacturer with a business on Buttermarket Street and a Unitarian theology teacher; according to one source, his mother, Margaret Jackson, was a housemaid.

William Gaskell was tutored by a local minister, Joseph Saul.

William Gaskell then trained for the Unitarian ministry at Manchester New College, at that time located in York, where his tutors included Charles Wellbeloved and James Turner.

William Gaskell was the assistant minister of Cross Street Chapel in Manchester from 1828 to 1854, and senior minister thereafter, a position he held until his death.

Contemporaries considered William Gaskell to be a brilliant preacher, though he never spoke extemporaneously; he was certainly a hard-working one, often preaching three times on Sundays.

William Gaskell led the congregation from 1828 to 1884, exercising wide influence within and outside the Unitarian movement.

William Gaskell championed the Lower Mosley Street Schools, which the Cross Street Chapel sponsored to serve the areas near the River Medlock.

William Gaskell worked for education opportunities for the area's working class, and advocated for the Mechanics Institute movement.

William Gaskell was supported in his educational and humanitarian work by his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.

William Gaskell came to be numbered among the most prominent Unitarians in the country; in 1859, he was offered the ministry at Essex Street Chapel in London, the leading post in the British Unitarian ministry, but turned it down, preferring to remain at Cross Street.

The William Gaskell family moved between the two worlds, allowing William Gaskell not only to collect charitable subscriptions from their wide circle and promote longer-lasting changes from within the local bureaucracy, but to understand the real concerns of those living in poverty, with whom he was probably more at ease.

William Gaskell was active in the District Provident Society, an organisation founded by James Kay and William Langton with similar pragmatic aims.

William Gaskell supported public health measures and housing reform, sitting on the committee of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, as well as another committee formed to regulate beer halls in the area.

William Gaskell was a gifted teacher and lecturer, with a lifelong determination to expand the educational opportunities available to the working classes in Manchester.

Lessons covered basic numeracy and literacy in addition to traditional Biblical teaching, and William Gaskell defended the practice of giving non-religious instruction on a Sunday, saying that they were doing 'their Father's business' by teaching reading.

In 1836, William Gaskell started to give evening classes at the Manchester Mechanics' Institute, which was later to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

The lectures were popular, and William Gaskell repeated them in several other venues.

William Gaskell became renowned for his reading, which a former student described as 'clear and sweet'; his reading of poetry was recalled to have 'a peculiar charm, for while he had a keen ear for the subtleties of rhyme, rhythm and metre, nothing was ever lost of the meaning or the beauty of the words'.

William Gaskell lectured at the Owens College, founded in 1846 with a legacy from John Owens.

William Gaskell gave private tutoring to both men and women; notable pupils included hymn translator Catherine Winkworth and her sister, the translator Susanna Winkworth.

William Gaskell was chairman of the Portico Library in Manchester for 30 years.

In 1854 William Gaskell co-founded the Unitarian Home Missionary Board, which trained working-class Unitarian ministers.

William Gaskell taught literature, history, and New Testament Greek, initially from his study at Plymouth Grove.

William Gaskell served on the committee of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which gave public lectures and campaigned for social change; in 1849, he became the Chairman of the Portico Library, a subscription lending library.

William Gaskell seemed to relish the immense teaching burden he accumulated in later life.

William Gaskell had a fascination with language and was an expert on the Lancashire dialect.

William Gaskell published numerous pamphlets and sermons, and wrote or translated over seventy hymns, some of which are still sung.

William Gaskell always encouraged his wife's writing, advising her on dialect, editing her manuscripts and acting as her literary agent.

William Gaskell supported her when some of her novels, particularly Mary Barton and Ruth, drew strong criticism for their radical views, as well as through the threatened lawsuits over her biography of Charlotte Bronte.

William Gaskell survived his wife by almost two decades, working full-time until six months before his death, aided by his two unmarried daughters.

William Gaskell died of bronchitis in Manchester in 1884, and is buried beside Elizabeth at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford.

William Gaskell was portrayed by Bill Nighy in the Granada Television mini-series, God's Messengers.