Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/229

 preacher, and manly and kindly friend, whose remains rest in the General Cemetery, Birmingham, under a plain slab, but whose memory is honoured by a canopied statue. Another statue is in the hall of the Central Free Library, Birmingham, the scene of his labours and honours for more than thirty years.

The following pamphlets were published during his life: 1. ‘Address to the Eclectic Society,’ 1846. 2. ‘The Demands of the Age upon the Church’ (three sermons), 1847. 3. ‘On the Romish Church and her Hierarchy,’ 1850. 4. ‘Two Lectures on the Papal Aggression Controversy,’ 1851. 5. ‘The Christian Sunday not the Jewish Sabbath’ (three discourses), 1856. 6. ‘Inaugural Address at the Opening of the Free Reference Library,’ 1866. The following selections from his sermons, prayers, and lectures have been published from shorthand notes: ‘Sermons,’ 4 vols., 1878–82; ‘Prayers,’ 2 vols., 1878–83; ‘Biographical Lectures,’ 2 vols., 1886 and 1887.

[Ireland's Recollections of George Dawson and his Lectures in Manchester in 1846, 1882; Crosskey's Memoir of George Dawson, 1876; family papers and personal knowledge.] 

DAWSON, HENRY (1811–1878), landscape-painter, was born in Waterhouse Lane, Hull, 3 April 1811, during a temporary residence of his parents in that town. The next year they returned to Nottingham, where he lived till he was thirty-three years old. His father had been in good circumstances as a cheesemonger, but had lost his money and his business, and had also fallen into bad habits, so that from the time of his son's birth till his own death his weekly earnings as a flax-dresser amounted to but a few shillings, most of which he spent on himself. Fortunately Dawson's mother was a woman of courage and character, and managed mainly by her own exertions to preserve a home. Her maiden name was Hannah Shardlow, but had been changed by a previous marriage to Hannah Moore before she became Mrs. Dawson. She is said to have been descended from a good family, connected with John Robinson, bishop of London from 1714 to 1723. The circumstances of Dawson's childhood did not permit of much education. After about a year and a half at the national school of Nottingham, he, when between eight and nine years of age, was put to work a wheel at a rope-walk, afterwards he became a ‘twist hand’ at a lace factory, and it was in the manufacture of lace that he was employed till he finally adopted art as a profession in 1835. Just before this determination he had perfected, in concert with a friend, a machine which introduced an important novelty in lace-making, and if their capital had sufficed to bear a longer strain it is probable that the whole course of his life would have been directed in another channel. As it was, they had to give up the struggle to introduce their new product, for which a strong demand sprang up a few months after.

His bent had always been towards art. From his earliest years he had delighted in drawing anything and everything, as he expresses it, ‘from Green's balloon downwards,’ but his favourite subjects seem to have been electioneering processions, ships and boats, and the great sea serpent. He soon, however, found his way to landscape, and he had earned money by his sketches (a hairdresser and picture-dealer named Roberts being one of his earliest patrons and best customers) before he resolved to leave the lace factory. In this resolve he was encouraged by his mother, who had always favoured his artistic tendency, and the result of his first year as an artist, though only amounting to about 40l., was much the same as he had been earning as a ‘hand.’ Among the first to recognise Dawson's genius and to purchase his pictures were William Wild, the keeper of the lock on the Trent, and the Rev. Alfred Padley of Bulwell Hall; and another early encourager who was of great service to him was Mr. F. Cooper, of the Greyhound Inn, Trent Bridge Road, a dealer in old masters, by whose aid he was able to study fine examples of great painters. In 1840 his income reached what to him was the considerable sum of 130l. His position now appeared to him to justify matrimony, and on 16 June 1840 he married Elizabeth Whittle, to whom he had been some time attached. But fortune left off smiling just at this juncture, and his income gradually sank to the level from which it had started in 1835. In February 1844 he lost his mother, and in October of that year, with his wife and two children (Henry and Alfred, both of whom have since made their mark in art and mechanics), he moved to Liverpool. He took a house (19 Ashton Street, Pembroke Place), and settled down with 30l. clear in his pocket. At first he had neither friend nor introduction; but it was not long before he found a purchaser in Mr. Richardson, a picture-dealer, who paid him 12l. for a small forest scene called ‘The Major Oak.’ This picture shows that Dawson was already a powerful painter, an original colorist, and a draughtsman of exceptional skill. After this though his funds were often at a very low ebb, his career in Liverpool was comparatively smooth. 