Edward Rushton (1756-1814), a bookseller and poet. At the age of eleven, Rushton was apprenticed to a firm of West India shippers. When he was seventeen, he went on a slave trading expedition to Guinea. Disgusted at the way the Negroes were treated, he reproached the Captain and was accused of mutiny. Rushton lost his sight on this voyage caring for the Negroes who were stricken with opthalmia. In 1782 he published The Dismembered Empire, condemnatory of the American war. In 1787 he published West Indian Eclogues. After the French Revolution, Rushton founded a philosophical and literary society at Liverpool. His son, also Edward Rushton, became a leading member of the Reform Party in England later in the nineteenth century.
