1. William Roscoe was an English banker, lawyer, and briefly a Member of Parliament.
23 Facts About William Roscoe
1. 2.
William Roscoe is best known as one of England's first abolitionists, and as the author of the poem for children The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast.
3.
William Roscoe was born in Liverpool, where his father, a market gardener, kept a public house called the Bowling Green at Mount Pleasant.
4.
William Roscoe assisted his father in the work of the garden, but spent his leisure time on reading and study.
5.
William Roscoe had the courage to denounce the trans-Atlantic slave trade in his native town, where, at that time, a significant amount of the wealth came from slavery.
6.
William Roscoe was a member of Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel.
7.
In 1796, William Roscoe gave up legal practice, and toyed with the idea of going to the bar.
8.
William Roscoe succeeded in restoring to good order the affairs of a banking house in which his friend William Clark, then resident in Italy, was a partner.
9.
William Roscoe was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool in 1806, but the House of Commons was not for him, and at the dissolution in the following year he stood down.
10.
William Roscoe said he still desired to write a biography of Erasmus but lacked both leisure and youth.
11.
Around this time William Roscoe was asked to investigate the claims of the blind girl Margaret M'Avoy, who was said to be able to read using her fingers, at the request of Sir Joseph Banks.
12.
William Roscoe concluded that her amazing abilities were due to the fact that she was not blind.
13.
William Roscoe was closely associated with the formation of the Liverpool Royal Institution in Colquitt Street, first as chairman of the General Committee and subsequently as its first President.
14.
William Roscoe provides 1 or 2 pages of text for each of 112 specimens, giving the plant's binomial, a technical description followed by a fuller more general description, and ending with "observations" and "references".
15.
William Roscoe showed considerable moral courage as well as devotion to study.
16.
William Roscoe was a relatively early collector of the "Italian Primitives".
17.
William Roscoe died on 30 June 1831 and was buried in the Unitarian Grave Yard at Mount Pleasant, a memorial plaque indicates the approximate spot of his grave.
18.
William Roscoe wrote a long poem published in two parts called The Wrongs of Africa, and entered into a controversy with an ex-Roman Catholic priest called Fr Raymond Harris, who tried to justify the slave trade through the Bible.
19.
William Roscoe wrote a pamphlet in 1788 entitled "A General View of the African Slave Trade".
20.
William Roscoe was a political pamphleteer, and like many other Liberals of the day hailed the promise of liberty in the French Revolution.
21.
William Roscoe wrote the Sonnet on Parting with his Books on the 1816 sale of his library.
22.
William Roscoe's versatility was shown by the appearance of a folio monograph on the Monandrian Plants, which was published in 1828.
23.
Henry's wife, Maria William Roscoe, nee Fletcher, wrote a biography of Vittoria Colonna, and their son Henry Enfield William Roscoe was a chemist and vice-chancellor of the University of London.