William Charles Townsend

William Charles Townsend (1803–1850) was an English barrister, known as a historical and legal writer.

Life

He was the second son of William Townsend of Walton, Lancashire, and matriculated at The Queen's College, Oxford, on 4 July 1820, graduating B.A. in 1824 and M.A. in 1827. On 25 November 1828 he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn.[1]

Townsend first attached himself to the northern circuit, and then practised at the Cheshire and Manchester assizes. Later he obtained a practice on the North Wales circuit. In 1833 he was elected recorder of Macclesfield. In March 1850 he was appointed a queen's counsel, and in the same year became a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. He died shortly, on 8 May at Burntwood Lodge, Wandsworth Common, the house of his elder brother Richard Lateward Townsend, vicar of All Saints', Wandsworth, Surrey. He was buried in the vaults of Lincoln's Inn.[1]

Works

Townsend wrote:[1]

  • The Pæan of Orford, a poem, London, 1826.
  • The History and Memoirs of the House of Commons, London, 1843–4.
  • The Lives of Twelve Eminent Judges of the Last and of the Present Century, London, 1846.
  • Modern State Trials revised and illustrated, London, 1850.

He also contributed poems to Henry Fisher's Imperial Magazine, around 1820.[1]

Family

In 1834 Townsend married Frances, second daughter of Richard Wood of Macclesfield, who survived him; he died without issue.[1]

Notes
  1. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Townsend, William Charles" . Dictionary of National Biography. 57. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Townsend, William Charles". Dictionary of National Biography. 57. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

gollark: Regardless of what's actually happening with news, you can probably dredge up a decent amount of examples of people complaining about being too censored *and* the other way round.
gollark: With the butterfly-weather-control example that's derived from, you can't actually track every butterfly and simulate the air movements resulting from this (yet, with current technology and algorithms), but you can just assume some amount of random noise (from that and other sources) which make predictions about the weather unreliable over large time intervals.
gollark: That seems nitpicky, the small stuff is still *mostly* irrelevant because you can lump it together or treat it as noise.
gollark: Why are you invoking the butterfly effect here?
gollark: That would fit with the general pattern of governments responding to bad things.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.