John Roby

John Roby (5 January 1793 – 18 June 1850) was an English banker, poet, and writer.

Roby was born in Wigan, England in 1793, the son of Mary Aspull and a schoolmaster named Nehemiah Roby. He began his career as a banker in Rochdale, Lancashire. In his work Lancashire Sketches, Edwin Waugh recalled that, while Roby was working for the firm of Fenton and Roby in Rochdale, Waugh worked as an apprentice at the bookshop next door.

For the clergy of the district, and for a certain class of politicians, this shop was the chief rendezvous of the place. Roby used to slip in at evening, to have a chat with my employer [Thomas Holden], and a knot of congenial spirits who met him there. In the days when my head was yet but a little way higher than the counter, I remember how I used to listen to his versatile conversations.

Roby died in a shipwreck in June 1850. Despite clear weather, the S. S. Orion struck rocky bottom at Portpatrick en route from Liverpool to Glasgow.

Roby wrote an influential, two-volume study on English folklore, The Traditions of Lancashire, in 1829. The book was a hit with the British upper classes, and it was reprinted within a year. Roby published a second series in 1831. Francis Palgrave thanked Roby for the work and asked him to write more. Nevertheless, readers did not believe that a banker could have written the books, and speculation named several others as the real author, including Crofton Croker. The works were condensed into three volumes and republished in 1841 for the general public as Popular Traditions of Lancashire. Roby wrote in the introduction that he intended to continue with volumes on other popular English traditions, but he never followed up on the promise. Different versions of The Traditions of Lancashire were reprinted in 1906, 1911, 1928, and 1930. He taught a four-session course on "Tradition, as connected with, and illustrating history, antiquities, and Romance" in his hometown of Rochdale.

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