This is the first comprehensive collection of works by more than a hundred poets. It makes available scores of newly edited and annotated texts that have been previously unknown to readers and critics. Whilst this set features the profoundly important work of relatively familiar labouring-class writers like John Clare, James Hogg, Ebenezer Elliott, Samuel Bamford, Robert Story, Mary Smith, and Samuel Laycock β writers who were crucial in developing and consolidating a coherent, widely recognized, labouring-class tradition β the collection also brings to light the work of dozens of significant labouring-class writers whose poems have been lost or forgotten. Indeed, in many cases these are poets who, though enormously popular in their time, have never been reprinted. These three volumes trace the remarkable transformations in British culture that occurred over the course of the nineteenth-century. We see the effects of enclosure and the movement away from the countryside, the spread of literacy, the advent of Chartism and the Reform Bills, and the evolution of a genuine labour movement. Yet even as this verse reflects England's increasing urbanization and industrialization, it also reflects the continuing appeal of the countryside as a site of nostalgia, refuge, piety, social order, and cultural memory. As this poetry increasingly engages with broad social issues, it also reflects the continuing importance of poetry itself as a means of self-expression, self-empowerment, introspection, escape and pleasure.
