Beckside Lights

MP3 Audio CD. John Ackworth was the pseudonym of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist clergy who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent most of his life as a circuit missionary in Lancashire. Beckside Lights is the continuation to his famous set of tales Clog Shop Chronicles. Situated in the illusory town of Beckside, which was told to be someplace in Manchester and Bolton, the novel contains 12 stories of daily life in an interdependent Methodist society, which kept on with a third part, Doxy Dent. Founded on an amusing cluster of Methodists who met in Jabez Clegg's clog shop inglenook, the tales are mawkish now and again, yet John has a good sense of causticness and desists from preaching. John was also a student of the Lancashire language and the enunciated paragraphs in his volumes are principally drafted in a vocal form in the later part of 19th century Bolton address.

The Rev. F. R. Smith, of Eccles, who supersedes Rev. J. H. Corson as Superintendent of the Wesley circuit, Burnley, is the most popular John Ackworth, novelist of Clogshop Chronicles and other novels. He is from Yorkshire, having been at Snaith, but when he was at the age of 16, his parents resettled to Stockport. As was expected, considering that a great-grandfather, two grandfathers and seven uncles were all ministers, the juvenile man became an entrant for the spiritual leadership in 1876. His first circuit was in Castletown in the Isle of Man. Three years had passed and in the Worthing circuit he was asked to come by Farnworth. He then traveled to Sheffield where he had depression and was made certain by his physician that he would never sermonize once more. At the next Conference, he was taken to the Shotley Bridge and Consett circuit and his health was restored to its prior condition.