3: Alice Hopkinson (1787-1852): the mother of John Hopkinson

 Alice Hopkinson was born in the parish of Bury in Lancashire in 1787.  

People had always made cloth for their families, of course, but by the early 17th century the thriving market town of Bury, in the fertile valley of the River Irwell, had become one of the centres of a new style of cloth with a worsted warp and a woollen weft.  Merchants supplied the weavers with the raw materials and paid them for the finished cloth.  But by the end of the 18th century, the woollen trade was dwindling – cotton manufacturing was taking over.

The baptismal register of the Bury parish church of St Mary the Virgin records that Alice was the daughter of John Hopkinson of Walmersley, and that she was born on 15 January 1787 and baptised on 21 January, when she was six days old.  

• Walmersley township and the village of Walmersley – we can't tell if Alice's family lived in the township or in the village itself – lay north of Bury in hilly country where streams run down the valleys towards the River Irwell at the boundary of the township.  The township would soon become a centre of the cotton industry, with mills and bleach- and dye-works

• the Bury parish registers show increasing numbers of Hopkinsons from the early 17th century.  From the 1780s, the registers record the place of abode.  In the 10 years after Alice was born, the children of 9 Hopkinson households were baptised.  Between 1780 and 1820, 12 Hopkinsons from Walmersley were married in Bury, and 28 Hopkinsons from Walmersley were buried

• so Alice probably grew up in a place where her family had lived for many years and surrounded by relatives  

• unfortunately, the only time the mothers were named in the baptismal register was when they were not married to the father, and so it isn't possible to construct any sort of family tree

• I can find only one Probate for this period and that is for a farmer called William Hopkinson in 1798; this suggests that the Hopkinsons were not people of means 

• occupations are not given in the parish registers but we know that Alice's father John was a stone mason

• this was remembered by her granddaughter Mary (who had John's name incorrectly as Thomas) and is referred to in the Will of John Lomax, in which Alice is described as the daughter of "the late John Hopkinson Stone Mason of Bury or of B[…] near Bury".  (I think it says "Birch", which would be the hamlet of Birch in the township of Hopwood, about four miles SE of Bury – so John Hopkinson had left Walmersley by the time he died)

• in 1825, a William Hopkinson of Bury, stone mason, and a John Hopkinson of Elton, stone mason (Elton is less than a mile west of the parish church) stood sureties for one John Hamer – given that trades often ran in families, this gives us a tantalising possibility that these were near relatives, perhaps even brothers, of Alice's

Alice went out to work as a servant

• according to her granddaughter Mary, Alice became housekeeper to John Lomax

• she would by then be in her late twenties, which seems a little young for a housekeeper, but we don't know what style of household John Lomax kept.  I think we can assume, though, that Alice was an upper servant  

At the end of 1816 or in early 1817, in the raucous days of the Regency and not long after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Alice fell pregnant with John Lomax's child 

• the baby was born in the autumn of 1817 – according to Mary Hopkinson, in September

• Alice was then 30 years old and John Lomax was aged 53

On 5 November 1817, the babe was baptised Ellen Lomax Hopkinson in Runcorn

• Runcorn, on the south bank of the Mersey, had been known since the late 18th century as a health resort and even the growing industrialisation and the building of four important canals was not affecting its reputation.  So perhaps Alice was there for her health – her place of abode is given as Manchester  

• in the baptismal register, in the column for the 'Quality, Trade or Profession' of the father, the clergyman wrote "Baseborn"  

• she gave her daughter the middle name of Lomax – either she had a great nerve or John Lomax, from the beginning, had acknowledged responsibility for the child

In 1819, Alice gave birth to her second child and named her Elizabeth Lomax Hopkinson  

• she was born, according to Mary Hopkinson, in July – I can't find a baptism record for her 

Peterloo, 16 August 1819

• a month later, on 16 August, working people gathered for a mass rally in St Peter's Field to call for parliamentary reform.  Many were in their Sunday best.  It ended in the Peterloo Massacre and the deaths of 18 people.  The first to die was a 2 year old boy, thrown from his mother's arms in Cooper Street, where John Lomax had been living in 1800

On 6 March 1821, Alice's third child was born

• she was baptised Mary Lomax Hopkinson at the age of 1 at St John's, Manchester on 6 April 1822 (her birth date is given in the register)

• the name of Mary's father is given as John Lomax, gentleman

• Alice's address is given as Richmond Street

On 11 February 1824, John was born

• he was baptised John Lomax Hopkinson at St John's on 14 March, a month later

• again, his father's name was given as John Lomax, gentleman, and his mother's address as Richmond Street

At this time, John Lomax was living five minutes' walk away from Alice and the children

• his address is given in the 1825 Directory as 11 George Street

• George Street was in the fashionable residential area centred on St James's Church (built 1786) in Charlotte Street  

• nearby was the Scientific & Medical Society Building (later Owens College Medical School).  The Manchester Lit & Phil had its meeting room on George Street, where the scientist John Dalton and Roget, author of the thesaurus, were members.  The Portico Library was built nearby in 1806, and the Institute of Fine Arts. 

For a man like him – a well-to-do merchant in Georgian Manchester – to have a woman in keeping would have been no surprise to anybody.  But we don't know

• if they actually lived at any point in the same household together
• what John Lomax's friends and relatives knew about Alice Hopkinson and the children
• if Alice kept in touch with her family 
• if she lived discreetly – a quiet Mrs Hopkinson with a husband who went away on frequent voyages – or if she was sometimes a hostess when John Lomax's friends came to dine
• why he didn't marry her

The question of why he didn't marry Alice Hopkinson has fascinated their descendants for years.  We don't know whether Alice's children knew the reason.  If John Hopkinson knew, he never passed it on.

It seems unlikely that it was a question of class.  At his age and with his money, John Lomax could marry whomever he wished and he clearly thought that Alice would find a niche among the comfortably-off middle-classes when he provided for her in his Will.  

Was he already married?  John Lomax was quite a common name and the newspapers and parish registers of the time were sparse in their details, so I can't find out whether he was, or had ever been, married.  In 1827, when he made his Will, he mentioned only Alice and her children; there is no mention of any wife or other children.  And so if he, like William Makepeace Thackeray, had a wife confined to a lunatic asylum because of incurable mental illness, he had provided for her by a separate settlement.

I don't believe it can have been because Alice was already married, perhaps to some absent scoundrel – if she had been, John Lomax's solicitor would have made provision in the Will to protect her money from her husband, who might otherwise reappear and claim it.  A married woman's property belonged to her husband, not to her.   

Perhaps he had simply always been a bachelor who preferred unofficial liaisons.

At any rate, the relationship between John and Alice endured.  It didn't come to an end with Alice accepting financial support for Ellen in 1817.  Perhaps she simply fell for him and felt that their relationship mattered more than the status of being a wife.  And she evidently trusted him.  She must, in fact, have trusted him to look after the children if anything happened to her – death in childbed, for example.  John Lomax acknowledged the children as his, he undertook to provide for their future and he kept Alice and the children in comfort.  And she always had the comfortable knowledge that her children would have a proper education and would begin life with money behind them.  She was the daughter of a stone mason and had worked as a servant, but her children would be members of the middle class.  

Next:  4: Death of John Lomax: 1827