“One of the Busiest Men in Manchester”: William Edward Armytage Axon (1846-1913)

Written by Lucy M Evans, an author and retired librarian who has just published Axoniana : William Edward Armytage Axon (1846-1913) and the communities of print (2025).

A Manchester Man of Letters

William Edward Armytage Axon (1846-1913) rose from an unpromising beginning as a neglected, illegitimate baby, to become a familiar name on many a printed page. The folklorist Simon Young rightly claims that “The most prolific Manchester writer of this generation (and perhaps of any generation) was the extraordinary W.E.A. Axon.”¹

One way or another, the hard-working Axon certainly earned his living from the pen: he was a librarian, journalist, freelance author, editor and lecturer. A passionate reformer, a man of wide interests and abilities, he poured it all into print. Knowledge was sacred to him, to be shared, not hoarded. From this tiny, fragile figure came forth a torrent of articles, scholarly papers, sketches, dialect pieces, pamphlets, books, and perhaps what he revered most, poetry, original and translated for he was a talented self-taught linguist.

As predicted on his death, he is mainly remembered as a Manchester historian: his Annals of Manchester,² An Architectural and General Description of the Town Hall Manchester,³ and A History of the Bible Christian Church⁴ are significant reference works. What may have surprised his contemporaries is that his name still crops up in folklore, folksong, dialect and linguistic circles, in scholarly research, dietic and temperance history, and even medical matters.

The Story of the Axon Papers

On 6 February 1864, the young Axon, assistant at the Manchester Free Library, received a letter from his former Chief Librarian, R W Smiles, now editor of the Railway News in London. Smiles praised Axon’s “exquisite little poem”, adding “I had no idea your heart and lips were so touched with poetic fire.”  Axon kept this precious tribute and with it started the vast archive that is now known as the Axon Papers. Inevitably, he was an assiduous letter writer and garnered a harvest of replies. He collected nearly 7000 letters from around 2000 correspondents and included about 100 copies of his own letters.

In 1936 his son Ernest sorted through the daunting pile, removing letters from people still living as well as sensitive material. The accumulated jumbles of Axon’s autograph letters, bookplates, newspaper cuttings and ephemera together with his unpublished manuscripts, drafts and proofs were sucked into the morass. Ernest included notes of his father’s early life and added his own correspondence, totalling around 1500 letters, and covering both WW1 and WW2 – fascinating material for further research.

In 1963 Robert Walmsley, scholar, bookman and proprietor of Shaw’s Bookshop on Police Street, purchased the Axon Papers. According to his account, the papers had been sold by Ernest’s executors but as Ernest died in 1947 it is more likely that the family sold them after Ernest’s son Geoffrey’s death in 1961.

On 19 March 1964, Walmsley presented his paper “Dr. Axon-Manchester Bookman” to the Manchester Society of Book Collectors. He gave the address in the sympathetic surrounds of the Central Library where both Ernest and Geoffrey, following in William Axon’s footsteps, had been librarians. The catalogue, as Walmsley remarked, held over two hundred entries for William Axon. Walmsley’s paper was the product of his expert delving amongst the Axon Papers. It was the first major study article on Axon, aptly described by Walmsley as “bookman, bibliographer, social worker, temperance advocate and dietic reformer”.⁵

After Walmsley’s death in 1976, his two sons took over the bookshop, and in 1978 a perceptive curator from the John Rylands Library purchased the Axon Papers. The whole collection resides in a dozen boxes: the numbered letters filed in chronological order. Ernest had grumbled at the lack of an index and probably was the one who provided the chronological list of letters, giving the correspondent’s name and a brief content note. This list evolved into an invaluable Excel spreadsheet tabulating the individuals, letters, dates, boxes and in some cases providing notes to identify correspondents.

The John Rylands generously sent me this spreadsheet. Without it I would never have been able to disentangle the stories of William Axon and his correspondents. The spreadsheet is an essential tool as other researchers have found. The Axon Papers have contributed significantly to three works I have come across on the Gaskells,⁶ the Anti Caste campaigner Catherine Impey,⁷ and Axon’s great friend, the African American classics professor, William Sanders Scarborough.⁸ These researchers were focused on a particular correspondent, whereas my task was to extract chronologically an overall view of Axon’s life, works, and circles, to explore his relationship over time with each correspondent.

Tackling the Axon Papers

I never thought I could read through all 7000 letters, but I became obsessed with following the threads of both of Axon’s life and the linking stories of the very disparate people who populated his world. The spreadsheet enabled me to trace when a particular correspondence started and how it peaked, declined and ended. Axon had a gift for cultivating perfect strangers, often first sending them information or one of his pamphlets, and then gently drawing them into his extensive networks.

There are dozens of well-known names amongst the correspondents: Mrs. Linnaeus Banks, Ford Madox Brown, Hall Caine, Edward Carpenter, Meta Gaskell, Abel Heywood, Prince Kropotkin, Francis Wiliam Newman, George Saintsbury, C P Scott – the list goes on. They rub shoulders with Axon’s neighbours, local antiquarians, lowly associates from his reform movements, and childhood friends. Axon had little time for class snobbery, was proud of his working-class background, and remained faithful to whoever was in his inner circle of trusted friends.

There are many surprises to be found in the letters. Mental and physical breakdowns are regarded sympathetically, there is mutual support rather than competition amongst the young aspiring writers, direct expressions of emotion emerging from formality, and of course the jokes and riddles in which Victorians delighted. There are instances of Axon’s acts of kindness that still have the power to move. Despite Ernest’s censorship there are also scandals, sharp and bitter comments, and some drafts of Axon’s own letters reveal attempts to temper his rare anger. Much of course is business and letters that seem uninteresting in themselves but build up to reveal the inside working of publishers, printers, journalists, and aspiring writers.  Scattered clues enabled me to identify more of Axon’s works: a significant portion of his output was anonymous or published under pseudonyms.

Other Paths

In two letters written during WW1, Ernest mentions his ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) nephew, Bentley Haddow, from New Zealand. This tiny detail impacted my hitherto unsuccessful quest for Axon’s descendants. At last I tracked them down, not just in New Zealand but also in Sardinia, England, and Wales. Axon was still revered by the different branches of his family. Papers, ephemera and photographs were entrusted to me, fundamentally changing the direction of the biography. One of the manuscripts from New Zealand, the memoir by his son-in-law, Joe Haddow, entitled We Two, has now been added to the Axon Papers.

For thirty years, Axon was a Manchester Guardian journalist. I consulted the Guardian Archive in conjunction with the Axon Papers to determine more details of his career and to identify his articles. I was shocked to discover the real reasons behind his retirement in 1905: Axon’s probable nemesis, the loathsome figure of G. Binney Dibblee, emerges from these pages.

The Path Not Taken

I should have explored the John Howard Nodal archive at the John Rylands Library. Nodal and Axon were old friends, moving in very much the same circles of journalism, dialect, and the Manchester Literary Club. They have several correspondents in common.

There are twenty-three letters from Nodal in the Axon papers. In one, the much-tried Nodal, snarls at Axon for wanting more “useless meetings” of the English Dialect Society. Axon was certainly addicted to societies and endless meetings.

At 130 letters, the Nodal Archive hardly rivals the Axon Papers. However, by this stage I had rather flagged, and John Howard Nodal remains on my conscience.

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1. Simon Young, ‘Lancashire Folklore Writing, 1829-1923’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 114 (2023), 148-167. ↩︎
2. William E. A. Axon (ed.), The Annals of Manchester: a Chronological Record from the Earliest Times to the End of 1885, John Heywood (1886). ↩︎
3. William E. A. Axon (ed.), An Architectural and General Description of the Town Hall Manchester to which is added A Report of the Inaugural Proceedings, September, 1877, Heywood (1878). ↩︎
4. William E.A. Axon, A History of the Bible Christian Church Salford from 1809 to 1909, Bible Christian Church (1909). ↩︎
5. Robert Walmsley, ‘Dr. Axon-Manchester Bookman’, The Manchester Review (Summer-Autumn 1964), 138-154. ↩︎
6. Irene Wiltshire (ed.), Letters of Mrs Gaskell’s Daughters, 1856-1914, HEB (2012). ↩︎
7. Caroline Bressey, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste, Bloomsbury (2013). ↩︎
8. William Sanders Scarborough, Michele Valerie Ronnick (eds), The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: an American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, WSUP (2005). ↩︎

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