William Harrison Ainsworth, the popular Victorian historical novelist, had a long association with Chetham’s Library. Born in King Street, Manchester, in 1805, Ainsworth attended Manchester Grammar School on the library’s...
By the 1570s, John Dee had established at his home of Mortlake what has been described as the largest and most diverse library in Elizabethan England, containing—according to Dee—three thousand...
At around midday on 15 February 1596, following an arduous journey by road and water, John Dee arrived in Tudor Manchester. Five days later, he was installed in a (presumably...
On 8 September 1597, the famed Renaissance polymath John Dee wrote to his friend, Sir Edward Dyer, to complain about the ‘tymes of very great dearth here … I can...
Grey and bustling, Manchester emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the first industrial city, churning out cotton through its steam mills and the toil of the labouring class...
One member of the Sun Inn Group of poets who met at Poets’ Corner, who is now among the most famous but was little-known at the time, was Mrs Isabella...
During the nineteenth century, Manchester was one of the most written-about cities globally; it was famously the subject of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written following the Peterloo Massacre...
‘Near to the gates of Chetham College, in Long Millgate, stands one of those ancient and picturesque houses, which occasionally start to view like spectres of a bygone age, but...
On Friday 4 November 1938, the Library Committee of Chetham’s Library assembled—perhaps in the library’s Reading Room—as Chetham’s Librarian prepared to address them. The weather in Manchester that day was...
