Over 100 poets of labouring class origin were published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were hugely popular and important in their day but few are available today. This is a collection of some of those poems from the 19th century.
'Thanks to John Goodridge and his formidable team of editors and scholars, labouring-class poetry is now a definitive feature on the literary map of Romanticism.' BARS Bulletin & Review 'Ambitious and wide ranging...this set is a magnificent scholarly achievement.' Studies in Hogg and his World '[an] excellent work, bringing to light a good deal of previously inaccessible material' Times Literary Supplement
John Goodridge, Nottingham Trent University, is the author of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (1996) and editor of the John Clare Society Journal Kaye Kossick is at University of Northumbria at Newcastle Simon Kovesi is at Oxford Brookes University Scott McEathron is at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale David Fairer is at the University of Leeds