1: 1824

 

George IV, 1821

In 1824, John Hopkinson was born in Manchester and Alice Dewhurst was born in Skipton.  It was the reign of George IV, now a vastly corpulent and heavily corseted 62 year old, in ailing health after his long years of high living.  

The years after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 had brought recession, unemployment, growing radicalism and rapidly developing industrialisation.  

The Tory government was holding firm against demands for social and political reform.  

The Church of England's entrenched position of privilege was under pressure – the civil disabilities suffered by Catholics and Nonconformists were acutely felt, especially as their congregations had to fund their own churches and Sunday Schools as well as paying tithes to their parish's Anglican clergyman.  

Large steam-powered cotton mills had transformed the Lancashire textile industry and the landscape; villages had become industrial hamlets of terraced cottages and industrial towns had grown up along the valley bottoms.  In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Northumbrian George Stephenson and the Darlington Quaker Edward Pease were building steam locomotives to run between the collieries of Shildon and the port of Stockton-on-Tees.  

One of George Stephenson's locomotives for the Killingworth Colliery

The future Queen Victoria was five years old, seeing few people and playing with her dolls and her spaniel.  In London, Charles Dickens, a small and traumatised 12-year-old, was working ten hours a day, six days a week, in a blacking factory.  Thirty miles from Alice Dewhurst's home in Skipton, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, aged eight and six, and their two elder sisters were enduring life at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge – this would be Charlotte's model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  Sir Edwin Landseer made his first of his many visits to the Scottish Highlands and John Constable's The Hay Wain was exhibited to great acclaim in Paris.

John Hopkinson was the fourth of five children, and the only boy.  Alice Dewhurst was the fifth of seven children – she had three sisters and three brothers.  

John was older than Alice by some nine months; I'll begin the story with him.

Next:  2: John Lomax of Manchester (1763/4-1827): the father of John Hopkinson