Poems of Rev. Thomas Harrison Collinson

A manuscript of 96 folios of unpublished poems, together with his printed Poems of life (London: St Catherine Press, 1930), with extensive manuscript revisions.

Thomas Harrison Collinson (1865-1942) was born in Windermere on 28 March 1865. He was educated at Worcester College Oxford, gaining an MA in 1890. He was ordained in 1888 to the curacy of Holy Trinity, Kingswinford, and was later rector of Newton Reigny and of Great Musgrave. Collinson wrote poems throughout his life, publishing a number of works, including Lakeland poems and others (1905), A student's love songs (1920), and Poems of life (1930). He retired to Grange-over-Sands in 1927. In the late 1930s, Collinson wished to publish a complete and revised edition of his poetry. In 1937 he deposited manuscript copies of his poems with the John Rylands Library and in Oxford, in an attempt to safeguard the poems from loss before publication. He appointed the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University to be the executor of his will, and requested that his poems should be published. Collinson died on 7 January 1942. A posthumous collection of his poems was published as Poems old and new, selected and edited by Adam Fox (1944). However, this only includes a small proportion of his poems.

The manuscript is available for consultation by any accredited reader.

Presented to the John Rylands Library by the writer, Reverend Thomas Harrison Collinson of Grange-over-Sands, in March 1937.

Description compiled by Henry Sullivan, project archivist, and Elizabeth Gow, with reference to Poems old and new, selected and edited by Adam Fox (1944).

Catalogued in the Supplementary Hand-List of Western Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, 1937 (English MS 896).