John Collier

Who was John Collier?

John Collier was an English caricaturist and satirical poet known by the pseudonym of Tim Bobbin, or Timothy Bobbin. Collier styled himself as the Lancashire Hogarth.

Born in Urmston, Lancashire, the son of an impoverished curate, he moved to Milnrow at the age of 17 to work as a schoolmaster. Marriage and nine children meant he needed to supplement his income and he began producing illustrated satirical poetry in Lancashire dialect and a book of dialect terms. His first and most famous work, A View of the Lancashire Dialect, or, Tummus and Mary, appeared in 1746, and is the earliest significant piece of Lancashire dialect to be published. He regularly travelled to Rochdale to sell his work in the local pubs where most of the business of Rochdale was conducted as there was no cloth hall at that time. People in the pubs would ask him to draw portraits of them and their friends and he would charge on the basis of the number of heads in the picture. The Lancashire dialect poetry collection, Human Passions Delineated, a work which he both wrote and illustrated, appeared in 1773. In it he savagely lampooned the behaviour of upper and lower classes alike.