Reverend Joshua Brookes

(extract from The Manchester Man by Mrs Linnæus Banks 1874)

Manchester had at that date two eccentric clergymen attached to the Collegiate Church. The one, Parson Gatcliffe, a fine man, a polished gentleman, an eloquent preacher, but a bon vivant of whom many stories are told. The other, the Reverend Joshua Brookes, a short stumpy man (so like to the old knave of clubs in mourning that the sobriquet of the "Knave of Clubs" stuck to him), was a rough, crusted, unpolished, black-diamond, hasty in temper, harsh in tone, blunt in speech and in the pulpit, but with a true heart beating under the angular external crystals; and he was a good liver of another sort than his colleague.

He was the son of a crippled and not too sober shoemaker, who, when the boy's intense desire for learning had attracted the attention and patronage of Parson Ainscough, went to the homes of several wealthy denizens of the town, to ask for pecuniary aid to send his son Joshua to college. The youth's scholarly attainments had already obtained him an exhibition at the Free Grammar School, which, coupled with the donations obtained by his father and the helping hand of Parson Ainscough, enabled him to keep his terms and to graduate at Brazenose, to become a master in the grammar school in which he had been taught, and a chaplain in the Collegiate Church.

So conscientious was he in the performance of his sacred duties that, albeit he was wont to exercise his calling after a peculiarly rough fashion of his own, he married, christened, buried more people during his ministry than all the other ecclesiastics put together.

The Manchester Man was written by Mrs Linnæus Banks in 1874. Originally serialized in Cassell's Monthly Magazine and published in book form 1876. This extract is taken from a reproduction of the 1896 Illustrated Edition by Northern Publishing Services 1997.