Learn About Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley on good-read.club

Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Born: September 28 1851

Died: 2727 05 19201920

Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley was a Church of England clergyman, poet, hymn writer, local politician, and conservationist. He was also one of the founders of the National Trust.

Living in the English Lake District for more than thirty years, he worked for the protection of the countryside and secured the support of people of influence for his campaigns.

Rawnsley was born at the rectory, Shiplake, Oxfordshire, England, the fourth of ten children of the Rev Robert Drummond Burrell Rawnsley and his wife, Catherine Ann, née Franklin . An older brother, Willingham Franklin Rawnsley, became an author and schoolmaster. He was educated at Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was prominent in university athletics and rowing. He gained a third class degree in natural science in 1874 and was awarded his Master of Arts degree in 1875. In the same year he was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England and became the first chaplain of Clifton College mission, ministering to one of Bristol's poorest areas.

Rawnsley published more than forty books, mostly non-fiction, some on religious subjects, many with a Lake District theme, and, as the Dictionary of National Biography put it, "as a minor lake poet, a vast output of verse."[4][5] His memoir of Ruskin, described by The New York Times as "in many ways the best volume [of] his series of books upon some of the literary aspects of the Lake Country",[9] was published in 1901.[1]

After 34 years at Crosthwaite he retired to Grasmere, where, in 1915, he had bought Allan Bank, the house in which William Wordsworth had lived between 1807 and 1813. Edith Rawnsley died in 1916, and two years later, Rawnsley married Eleanor "Nellie" Foster Simpson, who had been his secretary and was also an author. She completed his biography, published by Maclehose, Jackson & Co in 1923. Rawnsley died at his home in Grasmere and is buried in the churchyard of his former parish, St. Kentigern's, Crosthwaite. He bequeathed Allan Bank to the National Trust, with Eleanor living there until her death in 1959. In its obituary notice, The Times said of him, "It is no exaggeration to say – and it is much to say of anyone – that England would be a much duller and less healthy and happy country if he had not lived and worked."

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Popular Genres

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley

Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley

Books from Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley

Ballads of brave deeds

A Rambler's Note-Book at the English Lakes

Poems, Ballads, and Bucolics

Valete: Tennyson and other memorial poems

Edward Thring. Teacher and Poet; pp. 1-117

A Rambler's Note-Book at the English Lakes, pp. 1-256

Ballads Of Brave Deeds (1896)

Memories of the Tennysons

Literary Associations of the English Lakes