William Stanley Roscoe

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William Stanley Roscoe (1782 – 31 October 1843) was an English poet, banker and abolitionist.

William Stanley Roscoe, son of William Roscoe by his wife Jane, daughter of Jane, second daughter of William Griffies, a Liverpool tradesman, was born at Liverpool in 1782. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and became a partner in his father's bank. In his latter years he was serjeant-at-mace to the court of passage at Liverpool. He died at Liverpool on 31 October 1843.^[a] He was the father of William Caldwell Roscoe.^[1] and Francis James Roscoe.

Roscoe was well acquainted with Italian literature, and in 1834 published a volume of Poems (London, 8vo), which was eulogised in Blackwood's Magazine.^[b] According to Warwick William Wroth, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, the verse is for the most part commonplace in subject and treatment.^[1] However, some later critics have found merit in several anti-slavery poems published in the volume, including the Pindaric "Ode to May, Written in 1807, on the Abolition of the African Slave Trade"; "On the Last Regiment of Polish Patriots Being Ordered by the French Government to Serve in the Island of St. Domingo", which concerns the quashing of the slave-led Haitian Revolution; and "The Ethiop", which imagines the overthrow of Caribbean slavery through a war of liberation led by an African-born hero loosely based on Toussaint L'Ouverture and includes strong Gothic themes.^[2]

One of Roscoe's poems, "To Spring: On the Banks of the Cam", was anthologised by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1912 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

• Kitson, Peter J.; Lee, Debbie; Mellor, Anne K.; Walvin, James (1999). Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation. Vol. 4. Online: Taylor & Francis. n.p.
• Wroth, Warwick William (1897). "Roscoe, William (1753-1831)" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 49. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 225. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.