John Roby
Encyclopedia
English people
The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
banker, poet, and writer. Roby was born in Wigan
Wigan
Wigan is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It stands on the River Douglas, south-west of Bolton, north of Warrington and west-northwest of Manchester. Wigan is the largest settlement in the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and is its administrative centre. The town of Wigan had a total...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1793, the son of Mary Aspull and a schoolmaster named Nehemiah Roby. He began his career as a banker in Rochdale
Rochdale
Rochdale is a large market town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the foothills of the Pennines on the River Roch, north-northwest of Oldham, and north-northeast of the city of Manchester. Rochdale is surrounded by several smaller settlements which together form the Metropolitan...
, Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
. In his work Lancashire Sketches, Edwin Waugh
Edwin Waugh
Edwin Waugh , poet, son of a shoemaker, was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, England, and, after a little schooling, apprenticed to a printer, Thomas Holden, at the age of 12...
recalled that, while Roby was working for the firm of Fenton and Roby in Rochdale, Waugh worked as an apprentice at the bookshop next door.
For the clergy of the district, and for a certain class of politicians, this shop was the chief rendezvous of the place. Roby used to slip in at evening, to have a chat with my employer [Thomas Holden], and a knot of congenial spirits who met him there. In the days when my head was vet but a little way higher than the counter, I remember how I used to listen to his versatile conversations.
He wrote an influential, two-volume study on English folklore
English folklore
English folklore is the folk tradition which has developed in England over a number of centuries. Some stories can be traced back to their roots, while the origin of others is uncertain or disputed...
, The Traditions of Lancashire, in 1829. The book was a hit with the British upper classes, and it was reprinted within a year. Roby published a second series in 1831. Francis Palgrave
Francis Palgrave
Sir Francis Palgrave FRS, born Francis Ephraim Cohen, was an English historian.- Early life :He was born in London, the son of Meyer Cohen, a Jewish stockbroker by his wife Rachel Levien Cohen . He was initially articled as a clerk to a London solicitor's firm, and remained there as chief clerk...
thanked Roby for the work and asked him to write more. Nevertheless, readers did not believe that a banker could have written the books, and speculation named several others as the real author, including Crofton Croker. The works were condensed into three volumes and republished in 1841 for the general public as Popular Traditions of Lancashire. Roby wrote in the introduction that he intended to continue with volumes on other popular English traditions, but he never followed up on the promise. Different versions of The Traditions of Lancashire were reprinted in 1906, 1911, 1928, and 1930. He taught a four-session course on "Tradition, as connected with, and illustrating history, antiquities, and Romance" in his hometown of Rochdale
Rochdale
Rochdale is a large market town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the foothills of the Pennines on the River Roch, north-northwest of Oldham, and north-northeast of the city of Manchester. Rochdale is surrounded by several smaller settlements which together form the Metropolitan...
.
In some respects, Roby's efforts presaged later work in folkloristics
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
. He used the term "oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
" long before it came into common academic usage. He noticed and wrote about similarities between folk beliefs in different regions in different eras. Roby denied any authority as a folklorist (antiquarian
Antiquarian
An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...
) and instead called himself simply a collector of oral traditions:
In the northern counties, and more particularly in Lancashire . . . it may readily be imagined that a number of interesting legends, anecdotes, and scraps of family history, are floating about, hitherto preserved chiefly in the shape of oral tradition. The antiquary, in most instances, rejects the information that does not present itself in the form of an authentic and well-attested fact; and legendary lore, in particular, he throws aside, as worthless and unprofitable. The author of the 'Traditions of Lancashire,' in leaving the dry and heraldic pedigree which unfortunately constitute the great bulk of those works that bear the name of county histories, enters on the more entertaining, though sometimes apocryphal narratives, which exemplify and embellish the records of our forefathers.
A native of Lancashire, and residing there during the greater part of his life, he has been enabled to collect a mass of local traditions, now fast dying from the memories of the inhabitants. It is his object to perpetuate these interesting relics of the past, and to present them in a form that may be generally acceptable, divested of the dust and dross in which the originals are but too often disfigured, so as to appear worthless and uninviting.
Nevertheless, as folklore studies advanced, his work came to be viewed as untrustworthy. Roby seems to have been ignorant of the works of English antiquaries who were developing the field at the time. Instead, he sided with the Romanticists
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and saw folklore as faulty and lowly, the blemished utterances of peasants, which needed a more advanced hand to render in its full beauty. His technique was to collect folk stories and rewrite them into coherent tales in a more refined style. He used a copy of the Encyclopedia of Antiquities by Thomas Dudley Fosbroke
Thomas Dudley Fosbroke
Rev. Thomas Dudley Fosbroke , English antiquary, was born in London.He was educated at St Paul's School and Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating MA in 1792. In that year he was ordained and became curate of Horsley, Gloucestershire, where he remained till 1810...
(1825) to check details of "costume and furnishings." For example, when he was trying to write the tale of a boggart
Boggart
In Englishfolklore, a boggart is a household fairy which causes things to disappear, milk to sour, and dogs to go lame. Always malevolent, the boggart will follow its family wherever they flee...
rumoured to haunt the area of Clegg Hall
Clegg Hall
Clegg Hall is a 17th-century hall in Littleborough, Greater Manchester . It is situated just outside Smithy Bridge, Greater Manchester.The "Clegg" in the name of the current hall refers to the location rather than the local family by the same surname – the house was built by a Theophilus...
northeast of Rochdale, he found the tales of the locals too mutually irreconcilable to weave into a coherent whole. In the end, Roby took the only kernel of continuity—a jealous uncle who threw his two nephews into a moat to steal their inheritance in the 13th or 14th century and the subsequent haunting of the hall—and spun it into a 50-page work of fancy. Still, Roby's works were celebrated in their time, and later folklorists referred to them until the 1870s when new works on Lancashire legends superseded them. Folklorist William E. A. Axon
William Axon
William Edward Armytage Axon was a librarian and antiquary, and a journalist for Manchester Guardian. He contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography under his initials W. E. A. A.-Biography:...
wrote in 1899 of the caution with which Roby's works had come to be viewed: "The late Mr. John Roby, whose 'Traditions of Lancashire' first appeared in 1829, was a diligent collector of local legends, but his object was purely literary, and accordingly his book must be used cautiously, though it certainly contains important data."
Roby died in a shipwreck in June 1850. Despite clear weather, the S. S. Orion struck rocky bottom at Portpatrick
Portpatrick
Portpatrick is a village hanging on to the extreme south-westerly tip of mainland Scotland, cut into a cleft in steep cliffs.Dating back historically some 500 years, and built adjacent to the ruins of nearby Dunskey Castle, its position on the Rhins of Galloway affords visitors views of the...
en route from Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
to Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
. After his death, Roby's wife published his unfinished works and biography as The Legendary and Poetical Remains of John Roby, despite the fact that his life was "so private it afforded but few materials."