Willingham Franklin Rawnsley Willingham Franklin Rawnsley Willingham Franklin Rawnsley (1845?–1927) was a British author and the proprietor of a private school. Willingham Franklin Rawnsley was the oldest of ten children of the Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, rector of Halton Holgate in Lincolnshire, England, and Catherine Ann (Franklin) Rawnsley. The Arctic explorer John Franklin was his great-uncle, and as a child he served as a page at Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wedding. His younger brother Hardwicke became a Church of England clergyman and a founder of the National Trust. Rawnsley was educated at Christ Church and Corpus Christi Colleges at Oxford University, where he took honours
Hardwicke Rawnsley theme, and, as the "Dictionary of National Biography" put it, "as a minor lake poet, a vast output of verse." His memoir of Ruskin, described by "The New York Times" as "in many ways the best volume [of] his series of books upon some of the literary aspects of the Lake Country", was published in 1901. After 34 years at Crosthwaite he retired to Grasmere, where, in 1915, he had bought Allan Bank, the house in which William Wordsworth had lived between 1808 and 1811. Edith Rawnsley died in 1916, and two years later, Rawnsley married Eleanor "Nellie" Foster Simpson,