Joseph Adshead

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Joseph Adshead (1800–1861) was an English merchant, reformer and pamphleteer from Manchester. He was born in Ross, Herefordshire, and worked as an estate agent and merchant before settling in Manchester around 1820. He helped develop Victoria Park in 1835 and later faced bankruptcy in 1839 as a wholesale hosier.

In 1839 he joined the Council of the Anti-Corn Law League. A year earlier, with George Wilson, he founded the Night Asylum, a homeless shelter in Manchester, and served as its treasurer. He became involved with the British India Society and abolitionist circles, eventually serving as secretary of the Northern Central British India Society after a visit by Joseph Pease. He helped advance The British Indian Advocate with George Thompson and traveled to the United States in 1841, meeting James and Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia and returning from Boston with a note for Elizabeth Pease.

Adshead was a defendant director in the important case Foss v Harbottle (1843), which helped establish the rule that the company itself is the proper claimant when a wrong is alleged to have been done to it. He served Manchester as an Alderman for St. Anne’s Ward and supported public health causes, the Health of Towns Association, and homoeopathy. He pressed for rebuilding the Manchester Lunatic Asylum in the early 1840s and joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1856. Later in life, he lobbied for a convalescent hospital in the Manchester area.

He died on 15 February 1861 in Withington. Adshead was a correspondent of Florence Nightingale, who described him as “my best pupil.” The temperance engravings The Bottle by George Cruikshank were dedicated to him.

As a penal reformer, Adshead supported the separate system of imprisonment. In Prisons and Prisoners (1845) he described the Eastern State Penitentiary and criticized Charles Dickens’s views on the Pennsylvania system. He also attacked the 1843 Boston Prison Discipline Society report and wrote a sequel in 1847 arguing that the separate system could have positive effects, including for transported prisoners. He spoke on juvenile criminals and reformatories in 1856 and 1858, examining the costs and economies of reformatories and industrial schools. He was critical of Parkhurst prison, though not in the same way as Mary Carpenter, and wrote an introduction to George Catlin’s Steam Raft (1860).