​ 
Sirwilliamknighton.com
  • Home
  • About me
  • Reviews
  • Blog: Out-takes
  • Get the text
  • Contact
  • Privacy policy

The Reverend William Winterbotham

1/4/2015

 
Using money set aside for a new suit of clothes he [the young William Knighton] bought a book ... the now untraceable 'Winterbottom's History of America'.
Did I really write that? 

Winterbotham, William, An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States and of the European Settlements in America and the West Indies (London, 1795)
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Winterbotham's history of America was published in thirty weekly parts starting in June 1794, and as four unbound volumes the following year. Further editions and runs of weekly parts were published until 1818.

When the early editions appeared Knighton was apprenticed to his surgeon-apothecary uncle in Tavistock, but his ambition was 'to traverse the wilds of America'. More than thirty years later he described Winterbotham as 'an itinerant Methodist preacher, and a very clever man'. Winterbotham was in fact a Baptist preacher at a church in Plymouth, but Knighton was writing a chatty letter to his daughter, not a document of record.

It also slipped the mature Knighton's mind that Winterbotham wrote and published his history while serving a four-year sentence in Newgate for seditious sermons preached at Plymouth in November 1792. Knighton the apprentice would certainly have remembered. Plymouth is only fifteen miles or so from Tavistock, and Knighton's mother sold farm produce there. Winterbotham's trial the following year was national news, and the 1794 press notice for his book referred to its author's 'long unmerited Seclusion'. The 1795 notice described the recently-lost colony as 'this Land of Freedom', and I suspect, on the basis of flimsy circumstantial evidence, that the young Knighton held radical sympathies which the middle-aged Knighton preferred to forget.

The weekly parts cost a shilling each, and the four volumes were £1 16s in boards ready for binding, perhaps a third of the money set aside for Knighton's clothes. His sacrifice for his dream was significant but not total, and he never set foot in America. But neither did the Reverend Winterbotham (portrait).

Sources
  • Ford, John M T (editor), Medical History, Supplement No 7, A Medical Student at St Thomas's Hospital, 1801-1802. The Weekes Family Letters (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1987)
  • Knighton, Lady [Dorothea], Memoirs of Sir William Knighton, Bart, GCH, Keeper of the Privy Purse during the Reign of His Majesty King George the Fourth. Including his correspondence with many distinguished persons, 2 volumes (London: Richard Bentley, 1838) Internet Archive
  • Macleod, E, 'Civil Liberties and Baptists: William Winterbotham of Plymouth in prison and thinking of America', Baptist Quarterly, 44 (4) (2011) pages 196-222. Stirling Online Research Repository http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3587 accessed 30 March 2015
  • Mills, Susan J, ‘Winterbotham, William (1763–1829)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29771 accessed 3 Aug 2014
  • Styles, John, The Dress of the People. Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)
  • British Newspaper Archive

Comments are closed.

    What's here?

    Stuff about Knighton and his world that didn't make it into the book. 
    Things I stumbled across after I'd published. 

    Archives

    April 2015
    August 2014
    February 2014
    November 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    Categories

    All
    Medicine
    People
    Places

    Blogroll


    A Covent Garden Gilfurt's Guide to Life
    About 1816
    All Things Georgian
    Art of Mourning
    Austen Only
    Brain Pickings
    Dr Alun Withy
    18th and 19th Centuries
    English Historical Fiction Authors
    Flickering Lamps
    Fly High!
    Georgian Gems, Regency Reads & Victorian Voices
    Georgian Gentleman
    Georgian London
    History in the Margins
    History Workshop
    It's About Time
    Jane Austen's London
    Joanne Bailey Muses on History
    Landed Families of Britain and Ireland
    Madame Guillotine
    Mapping the Medieval Countryside
    Patter
    Prinny's Taylor
    ReginaJeffer's Blog
    Renaissance & Regency
    Rummage Repository

    Regency History
    Researching Food History—Cooking and Dining
    Royal Pavilion Brighton
    Spitalfields Life
    The Freelance History Writer
    The Ladies of Llangollen
    The Many-Headed Monster
    The Private Life of William Pitt (1759-1806)
    The Regency Redingote
    Two Nerdy History Girls
    Two Teens in the Time of Austen
    Untold Lives
    Unusual Historicals
    Victorian Policing
    Wellcome Library
    William Savage: Pen & Pension
    Women of History





    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License." > Button Text
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.