8: John Hopkinson goes to school: 1829-1840

John's granddaughter Mary gives us three stories from his early years, recorded by him in his notebook:

When he was about 5, he was sent out with Nurse and his sisters for a morning walk.  He was dressed in

The Yellow Boy by Sir Henry Raeburn
National Galleries of Scotland 

"very clean nankeen frock and trowsers" with very strict instructions to keep them clean and tidy

• at this point, the fashion for skeleton suits (high-waisted trousers buttoned onto a short jacket, as shown in the 'Basket of Cherries' below) was beginning to go and, from now until the 1860s, boys aged between about three and seven wore tunics over trousers like Walter Ross, portrayed by Sir Henry Raeburn in 'The Yellow Boy' of 1822.  The tunics might be loose and worn with a belt, or they might have a fitted waistband; there were a variety of styles

• John's suit was made of nankeen – pale yellow or buff-coloured cotton

• they must have been walking along Upper Brook Street, past scattered houses and villas and alongside open fields.  The fields weren't fenced or walled but enclosed by earth banks, behind which were deep wide ditches that filled with water after it had rained

• John ran ahead of the others – and the top of one of the banks was so inviting that he climbed it – only to topple over and fall into the water.  (I can't quite make out whether it was into one of the ditches or into the pond at the corner of Plymouth Grove and Upper Brook Street)  

• luckily one of his sisters saw him disappear and Nurse ran up and fished him out.  There was, he wrote, plenty of water to drown in

• even after 70 years he could still feel how uncomfortable he was in his clinging wet, dripping, draggled, dirty clothes – and "the internal and mental anguish" as he thought anxiously, "What would Mother say?"  She scolded him, just as he feared, and she sent him to bed for the rest of the day with no dinner

• his 8 year old sister Mary came up secretly to bring him something to eat.  He was very hungry but he wouldn't take the food – he preferred, he wrote, "loyally to endure the just sentence."

When he was five or six, he had a fight with Miss Stothart the governess

• she was a tall, gaunt woman with "no notion of children" – rather an odd choice for the job, we might think – and she had taken a toy from John's two year old sister Alice.  (This picture gives us an example of a little girl of the time)

  

  Children in 1828:
  'Basket of Cherries' by E W Gill

• John called Miss Stothart a thief and she took him bodily out of the room and into the passage at the bottom of the stairs.  There she held the struggling boy and unwisely dared him to say it again – so, of course, he had no choice.  "You are a thief, Miss Stothart," he said with utter conviction

• he couldn't remember what the consequence was, but years later one of his sisters wrote in a letter that when he was a little boy, "he loved truth and justice".

John was clearly a strong-willed and passionate child

• his eldest sister Ellen used to tell the story of how, when he was about 5 or 6, he was such a furious temper that he shouted out to her, "I will kill you!  I will kill you!" 

• Ellen, with great presence of mind, picked up the carving knife and said, "Do it, John."  It stopped him short and Ellen couldn't remember any outburst after that

In 1829 he was sent to a "ladies' school" – a genteel version of a dame school, I think – in Bloomsbury, Rusholme Road.  (I find on old maps that Bloomsbury was the name given to the western end of Rusholme Road beginning at Oxford Street.  I find, for example, the notice of an auction of very upmarket furniture to be held in 1844 at No 118 Bloomsbury "a few doors from Oxford Street")  

When he was 7½ and at the ladies' school, on 8 September 1831 Manchester celebrated the coronation of King William IV and Queen Adelaide with a grand procession.  John saw it go by from an upper window of a shop in Downing Street, which led to Ardwick Green – Alice must have obtained places for the family there

• all the windows on the route were packed with people and it was a pity that the weather was bad.  It had started with heavy rain and it drizzled most of the morning, so that many of the tens of thousands of Sunday School children in Manchester and Salford couldn't turn out

• John will have seen the Sunday Schools go by with their flags, and the 8th Hussars and the 18th Light Infantry – who would stop and fire a celebratory volley on Ardwick Green – and there were also bands, town dignitaries, the firemen with their fire engine, the freemasons, the Friendly Societies and all the trades, from tailors to organ-builders

• the trades had assembled at their club-houses before taking their places and their carriages must have been the best sight of all – the tin-plate workers had a man in a suit of scale armour, the farriers had a forge and four men at full work, the stone masons had a man working on a block of marble ... Messrs Fairbairn & Lillie, millwrights, had a waggon carrying an ancient mill and a modern steam engine and Mr Nathan Gough's men had a waggon bearing a steam engine at work, turning an organ playing national airs ...

• from his earliest days John took a deep interest in the work of artisans – perhaps this was one of the sights that first caught his attention.

At about the age of 8, boys graduated from tunics.  They began to wear short jackets, usually short and single-breasted, with trousers, which were generally narrowly cut

• in this practical outfit, John  began the next stage of his education at the boys' school at the

  

  Fairfield Moravian Church by S Parish
  CC BY-SA 2.0

  Moravian Settlement at Fairfield, which stood in the countryside some four miles to the east of his home

• Moravians were the earliest Protestants and their Settlement in Fairfield was opened in 1785.  It functioned as a self-contained village and, as education was an important part of their culture, they were known for their schools.  It isn't clear from Mary Hopkinson's account whether John was a boarder there or not

• he stayed at the Moravian School for two years  

At about this time, the family moved to Upper Brook Street, perhaps towards the southern end where short terraces of houses with gardens laid behind them made way for villas set in their own grounds.  There they lived 6 or 7 years.

In 1834, when he was 10, he left the Moravian School to become a boarder at Greenwood's School at Warley near Halifax, about 25 miles from home.  I think this must be the school advertising the new term here in the Leeds Mercury of 27 June 1835:

The Rev B Greenwood, A.B., begs to return his most cordial Thanks to his numerous Friends for their Patronage of his Establishment during a Number of Years.  He hopes that the Improvement of his Accommodations for Pupils will secure to his Academy a Continuance of that Support which it will be his Study and Ambition to merit. 

Terms for Board and Education from £20 to £26 per Annum, according to the age of the Pupil.

The School Re-opens on Monday, July 20th.

Spring Garden Academy, Warley, near Halifax

Spring Garden School later became Warley Grammar School – according to Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion it was on Burnley Road, Sowerby Bridge

• John had bright memories of receiving a Simnel cake from home, of a visit from his sister Ellen, then aged about 17 or 18, and of a journey to Bolton Abbey

• but when his finger was broken, it was set crooked and his mother went to see Dr Robertson (it isn't clear if this was the doctor or a master)

• and this can't have been a happy time for John, because he ran away from school and managed to reach Todmorden, about 10 miles off, before he was caught  

So it isn't surprising to find that after 18 months his mother removed him.  

In 1836, when he was 12, she sent him to Thomson's School at Bradford.  This was, according to White's Directory of 1837, at Westbrook House in Horton Road and was run by the Rev Andrew Weir Thomson.  As far as I can tell, this is the Westbrook House in Great Horton, a couple of miles south-west of Bradford. This advertisement in the York Herald of 4 January 1834 shows that Mr Thomson had started his school only a couple of years before John's arrival:

Boarding School Establishment

West-Brook House, Bradford

The Rev Andrew W Thomson will resume his Public Duties 

on Monday, 13th January next

Terms

Board and Tuition ... 35 Guineas per annum

Washing ... 2 Ditto ditto

Entrance, One Guinea

Drawing, Music, French, &c. on the usual Terms

Vacations at Midsummer and Christmas, One Month each.

A Quarter's Notice previously to leaving School.

Reference is kindly permitted to the Rev T Taylor,

Messrs Milligan and Forbes, Bradford; to William Tetley,

Esq., Asenby Lodge; and Mr Henry Masterman, Stationer, Thirsk.

Dec 23, 1833

It was in the Midsummer vacation of 1838 that John recorded in his notebook the great celebration in Manchester of another coronation – that of the young Queen Victoria, who was not quite 5 years older than John himself.  Another huge procession took place, the streets were packed, every window and doorway jammed and there were stages built wherever they could be fitted.  Among the 50,000 Sunday School children in the procession were those of the Rusholme Road Chapel.  It was a splendid occasion – interrupted by the chaos caused by a sudden and luckily brief thunderstorm.  

At Christmas 1838 he left the Rev Thomson's school.  He was nearly 15 and had reached the final stage of growing up – he must by now have been wearing a coat with tails, as the men did

• in January 1839, his mother sent to him to Mr Dougal's school at Chorlton Hall, which I think must have been the nearby Chorlton Hall in Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  A few years later it was being run as an early business school for young gentlemen, where they could learn practical skills such as mechanical drawing – I wonder whether this had started in John's time there

• by now he was spending most of his holidays with the bricklayers, joiners and other trades on the building sites springing up around his home, and he'd recorded in his notebook that work on the Manchester and Leeds Railway had begun.  

Manchester was now a phenomenon, one of the wonders of the modern world, the place where industrialisation could be seen going full pelt – and a place that horrified people.  The town astounded visitors with the noise, the smoke, the contrast between the huge factories, the vast workshops, the splendid stone buildings and the hovels and cellars, the squalor and wretchedness of the urban poor.  

The family was now living in Lloyd Street, Greenheys in the south-western part of the township of Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  It was semi-rural, if not actually rural, but building sites were never far away as Manchester extended ever further.  

Life for the Hopkinson family was about to change because the first of them was to leave home 

• Ellen was to marry George Ibberson Tubbs, a 26 year old Congregational minister, born in Mildenhall, Suffolk

• we don't know how Ellen met George.  Perhaps he was related to somebody she knew in Manchester or perhaps, like the Rev James Griffin, he came to Manchester to take services or preach in one of the chapels

• Ellen was married on 21 February 1839 in the Rusholme Road Chapel, Mr Griffin officiating

• Ellen had now passed her 21st birthday and come into the income left her by her father

• it's interesting that the space left for father's name in the register was left blank by Mr Griffin and Ellen's name is given simply as Ellen Hopkinson, missing out her middle name Lomax, but we can see her irregular birth did not prevent her making a very respectable marriage and becoming a minister's wife

• Ellen and George left Manchester for Warminster in Wiltshire, where he was a minister, and it was there that the first three children of their large family were born.  

In February 1840, John had his 16th birthday.  In the early part of the year he had a mild attack of smallpox, but luckily it left no scars.  He had reached the end of his schooldays and the beginning of his working life:  

• he became a Sunday School teacher at the Rusholme Road Chapel.  (His sisters were all Sunday School teachers there – James Griffin describes them as "among the most beloved and devoted teachers in the school") and

• on 30 May 1840 he was bound for 5 years as a "gentleman apprentice" to Messrs Wren & Bennett, Millwrights and Engineers

• this meant that a £100 premium was paid and he would receive no wages

So we can see that his mother Alice – who had taken up his part with Dr Robinson after his finger was set crooked, and who had let him spend his vacations out and about with the workmen – let him follow his talents and aptitude when it came to choosing his path in life.  She didn't insist, as some might have done, that he spent his vacations at his books and that he became a lawyer or a doctor.  She was devoted to her children and deeply interested in their concerns and she backed John's choice.

Next:  9: What was John Hopkinson like?

4: Death of John Lomax: 1827

By the beginning of 1827, Alice and her four children had moved north of Manchester to the fresh air and pleasant surroundings of semi-rural Cheetwood in the southern part of the township of Cheetham.  Was John Lomax living with them now?  We don't know.  Alice would be 40 years old on 15 January and she now thought she might be expecting her fifth child.

John Lomax had various business ventures:

• he had been buying property in Manchester, which will have been a profitable trade as the town grew ever bigger and busier.  He owned warehouses, land and houses.  We know he had bought the London Road Inn because when it was advertised to let in 1825, interested persons were to enquire at the Mathers, Lomax & Co warehouse or at 11 George Street, which was John Lomax's address.  (It was a "large and commodious" inn with two kitchens, five parlours on the first floor, dining room, 21 other rooms, stabling for 20 horses and "convenience for Carriages")

• he was still engaged in the affairs of Messrs Mathers, Lomax & Company.  His partners were now his 56 year old nephew Richard Hampson and the 33 year old John Philips Mather, presumably the son of John's old partner John Mather and his wife Susanna Philips.  John Philips Mather lived in Everton and must have run the port of Liverpool end of the firm's business.

John Lomax was close to his family and particularly to three of his nephews:  Richard Hampson (son of his sister Hannah), John Bentley (son of his sister Ellen) and his brother's son Robert Lomax.  Richard Hampson was of much the same age as John and had evidently been his friend and partner for a long while.  

John Lomax probably felt a rather fatherly protectiveness towards the other two nephews.  John Bentley had lost his father when he was a baby.  Robert Lomax lost his father when he was nearly 16 and then, when he was 24 and busy building up a business of his own, he had lost his mother and one of his unmarried sisters within six days of each other.  His sisters Ellen and Margaret were still at home with him.  

On 10 January 1827 John Lomax made his Will – or perhaps he was driven to make a new Will so as provide for the unborn child.  It seems to have been made in something of a hurry, which suggests that he was anxious for it to be executed as soon as possible: 

• the clerk at one point uses a standard abbreviation rather than the word in full
• the handwriting is poor, evidently written in haste
• there is an omission in the terms of the Will and the solicitor had to draw up a Codicil immediately after the Will was executed
• spaces were left for some names, which were then squeezed in by the clerk
• the order of the legacies suggests some afterthoughts  

He had reached the age of 63 in the striving, urgent merchant world of Georgian Manchester.  Perhaps his health had now failed and he was putting his affairs in order in case he didn't recover.

His Will covers 23 pages (of A3 paper) and most of it is taken up with the trusts he set up for Alice and the children

• Alice is described as the "Daughter of the late John Hopkinson Stone Mason of Bury or of Birch near Bury" and the children as "the three Daughters (Ellen Lomax Hopkinson Elizabeth Lomax Hopkinson and Mary Lomax Hopkinson) of the said Alice Hopkinson and John Lomax Hopkinson the son"

• his executors were his solicitor Samuel Kay and his three nephews Robert Lomax, John Bentley and Richard Hampson

• the trustees for Alice and the children were both young men – chosen, no doubt, because they would be most likely to see the children through to adulthood.  They were John's partner John Philips Mather and the Manchester solicitor Samuel Dukinfield Darbishire.  
• Darbishire was a young man of 28 whose family owned slate mines in Wales.  He was a Unitarian and he and his wife later became great friends of the writer Mrs Gaskell – whose husband was a Unitarian minister – and her family

• the nephews and the trustees obviously knew all about Alice

Mather and Darbishire were to raise £25,000 from the estate

• £5,000 each was allocated for Ellen, Elizabeth, Mary and John.  The maintenance, education and expenses of each child were to be paid from his or her share 

• by way of comparison, John Lomax's brother Robert had left his daughters £2,500 each and had allowed £80 a year per child for maintenance, education etc

• each daughter, when she reached 21, was to get the income on her share.  It was to be paid into her own hands, free from control by her husband.  This was long before the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 and John Lomax was ensuring no husband could deprive them of their money.  But the daughters only received the income, not the capital – they could dispose of that by Will, and if they didn't leave a Will it would go to their children, if any

• but so that Alice would still have funds, a daughter wouldn't receive her income in full while her mother was still alive because Alice was to be paid £100 of the income first (unless she had married)  

• John was to receive £1,000 of his share outright, as a capital sum, at the age of 21 and the remainder due to him at the age of 23 – but again, to provide for Alice, when John reached 21, the trustees were to invest £2,000 of his money and pay the interest to his mother

• the income from the last £5,000 was to be paid to Alice unless she married (in which case, she was assumed to be provided for by her husband).  If she died or married the income was to be used for the upbringing of "the child with which I apprehend the said Alice Hopkinson may be now enceinte [pregnant]" and would be that child's share

John Lomax intended to provide handsomely for Alice and the children.  The usual rate of interest through the 19th century was 4% or 5%, although railway investments could bring in 8%.  His son would have a good start in life and his daughters' income – say £200 or £250 – was very comfortable.  Some literary comparisons:

• Miss Bates and her mother in Jane Austen's Emma lived together on £100 a year

• Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters in Sense and Sensibility found themselves sharing an income of £500 and went to live for free in a cottage in Devonshire as a result

• Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion had a fortune of £10,000 to be divided between his three daughters

• Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice had £10,000 a year (no wonder Mrs Bennet was quite overcome) 

• the Revd Patrick Brontë's yearly income at Haworth (where he lived from 1820 to 1861) was £170; as governesses, his daughters might earn £25 a year

(We normally think in terms of inflation when comparing money, but since 1810, which is roughly when Jane Austen's novels were published, there had been deflation – which was to recur during the 19th century)  

John Lomax left legacies to his family

• 10 guineas each to his sisters Jane Orrell and Betty Stepford, his seventeen nieces and his nephews George Stopford and Richard Orrell 
  

• £100 to his cousin Edmund Pilkington, the son of his mother's sister Mary Knowles

• "my small silver Teapot which I now use" to his niece Ellen Lomax – it must have held a sentimental meaning for her   

All the rest of his household goods and furniture, pictures, printed books, plate, linen and china were for Alice's use during her lifetime and afterwards to be divided between her children.  There is no mention of any horses or carriages, but he clearly kept a good cellar:

• his three nephews Robert Lomax, Richard Hampson and John Bentley were left all his "Madeira Port and Hock wines" apart from 

• 10 dozen bottles of Madeira and 10 dozen bottles of Port which were to go to Alice.  She was also to have "all my other foreign and homemade wines and all my spiritous liquors for her own use"

• Alice was also to have the sum of £500

He gave his real property – warehouses, land, houses – and any remaining personal estate (ie everything except land, but including leaseholds) to his three nephews, Robert Lomax, John Bentley and Richard Hampson.

Five months later, on 5 June 1827, he died.  

He was buried on 11 June at the chapel at Ainsworth where his brother Robert, sister-in-law Mary and niece Betsey lay.

Ainsworth Unitarian Chapel by Alexander P Kapp

The notice of his death appeared in the newspapers – on 12 June in the Tyne Mercury (which came out on Tuesdays) and on 15 June in the Chester Chronicle and Liverpool Mercury (which both came out on Thursdays): 

On the 5th inst. in the 64th year of his age, John Lomax, Esq. of the firm of Messrs Mather, Lomax, and Co. of Manchester

Thirteen years later in 1840, his nephew Robert Lomax – who must have left the Unitarians for the Church of England – built Christ's Church, Harwood.  He commissioned Messrs Patteson of Manchester to  make two memorials – one for his parents Robert and Mary and the other, on behalf of himself, Richard Hampson and John Bentley, for their uncle John.  (The WWI memorial is directly beneath it, which is why you can see part of a poppy wreath in this photograph.)

A tribute of respect

from his affectionate Nephews

to JOHN LOMAX Esq

of Manchester

youngest son of Richard & Ellen

Lomax of Harwood,

who departed this life on the

fifth of June 1827

 aged 63 years

Not long after John's death, on 16 July, Alice's baby was born.  She named her Alice Lomax Hopkinson, and had her baptised on 26 August at St John's, Manchester.

Alice was left alone to raise five children under the age of ten.  John was only 3½ – he and his baby sister had no memory of John Lomax, but the older girls must have remembered their father.  Unfortunately, we don't have any stories from them.  They were long dead by the time Mary Hopkinson wrote her memoir and she had only her own memories of her aunts and the letters they had written to her parents.  

Alice stayed in Cheetwood for another couple of years but by September 1829 she had moved the family a couple of miles across to the other side of Manchester, to Rusholme Road in the township of Chorlton-upon-Medlock.  It had been marked for building a couple of decades earlier – maps show the outlines of housing plots – but not very many had been built as yet, and it was still a semi-rural area.

     Alice Hopkinson    –    John Lomax

                                                 1787-1852                 c1764-1827

                                                                     |

                                 |-------------------|-------------------|-----------------|----------------|

                           Ellen               Elizabeth              Mary                 John               Alice

                      b Sept 1817       b July 1819       b Mar 1821      b Feb 1824      b July 1827

                     d Aug 1900        d Jan 1887       d June 1866      d Mar 1902     d Dec 1881

Next:  5: The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin

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