Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

August 27.—There is an excellent public Library at Leeds, which has been established 50 years or upwards. The terms of subscribing are 3 guineas on becoming a subscriber and 7s 6d a year.—There is also a Library which probably from having been established by certain people is called the Jacobin Library—The other, the Old Library, on the contrary is called the Anti-Jacobin Library.—There are Assemblys at Leeds during the winter, once a fortnight, but of late they have not been very well attended,—they have also concerts but not with much success.—A Play House also, which is open part of each summer.

Provisions appear to be cheaper at Leeds than in those places from which the articles can be carried to London. A Fowl is sold for abt. 15d. The town is well supplied with Fish twice a week from Bridlington & Whitby, abt. 70 miles distant.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Bridlington (10) W/G ·
• Chicken (8) W/G ·
• Farington, Joseph (1747-1821) (13), landscape painter and diarist, inter alia of Turner W/G ·
• Fish (10) W/G ·
• Leeds Library (1768-) (2), oldest surviving subscription library of its type in the UK, founded in 1768 following an advertisement placed in the Leeds Intelligencer, first secretary was Joseph Priestley W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• London (84) W/G ·
• Music (26) W/G ·
• Public library (2) W/G ·
• The Theatre, Leeds (1771-1875) (3), built in Hunslet on the south bank for summer shows by Tate Wilkinson, only drama theatre in Leeds until 1864, partially rebuilt in 1867 to create the smarter Royal Theatre, which burnt down in 1875 W/G ·
• Theatre (24) W/G ·
• 📌Whitby (22), town, port and parish on the east coast of North Yorkshire/the North Riding at the mouth of the River Esk W/G ·

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Similar

24 July 1771: Actor-manager Tate Wilkinson opens Puritan Leeds’ first proper theatre with comic impressions of leading Methodists

20 June 1817: Lines spoken by the actor Alexander Cummins at the Leeds Theatre are enacted sooner than he might have wished

1 July 1840: The opening of the Hull and Selby Railway terminates the threat to Hull’s port from Goole, Scarborough and Bridlington

1 October 2010: A Lancastrian libertarian travels to Leeds to learn

2 October 1800: Part of an obituary to Harry Rowe, Punch and Judy man, trumpeter at the Battle of Culloden and the York assizes, who died today, old and ill, in the York poorhouse

12 April 1706: The first four-day stagecoaches from York to London and vice versa depart from the Black Swan in each city

4 June 1838: A lustful evangelical vicar approaches a childish parishioner in a high-church novel from London, today suppressed by the low-church Leeds Library

12 April 1924: The Bloomsbury Group’s Amabel Williams-Ellis finds little art for art’s sake in Leeds

24 March 1803: Painter Joseph Farington hears of a curious hobby of his Yorkshire colleague Francis Nicholson

19 December 1958: A London dock strike features in Dick Whittington at ready-to-wear clothing manufacturer John Barran’s, Leeds

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Dock strikes were frequent in London at the time, so I haven’t yet managed to confirm whether this was 1958.

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