Ebenezer Elliott
Though a factory owner himself, his single-minded devotion to the welfare of the labouring classes won him a sympathetic reputation long after his poetry ceased to be read.
[1] His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of eleven children, of whom eight reached maturity, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood.
[3] He hated school and preferred to play truant, spending his time exploring the countryside, observing the plants and local wildlife.
At the age of 14 he began to read extensively on his own account, and in his leisure hours he studied botany, collected plants and flowers, and was delighted by the appearance of "a beautiful green snake about a yard long, which on the fine Sabbath mornings about ten o'clock seemed to expect me at the top of Primrose Lane."
[1][2] In a fragment of autobiography printed in The Athenaeum (12 January 1850) he says that he was entirely self-taught, and attributes his poetic development to long country walks undertaken in search of wild flowers, and to a collection of books, including the works of Edward Young, Isaac Barrow, William Shenstone and John Milton, bequeathed to his father.
One Sunday morning, after a heavy night's drinking, Elliott missed chapel and visited his Aunt Robinson, where he was enthralled by some colour plates of flowers from James Sowerby's English Botany.
His younger brother, Giles, whom he had always admired, read him a poem from James Thomson's "The Seasons", which described polyanthus and auricular flowers, and this was a turning point in Elliott's life.
Other early poems were Second Nuptials and Night, or the Legend of Wharncliffe, which was described by the Monthly Review as the "Ne plus ultra of German horror and bombast".
His earlier volumes of poems, dealing with romantic themes, received much unfriendly comment, and the faults of Night, the earliest of these, were pointed out in a long and friendly letter (30 January 1819) from Southey to the author.
He remained bitter about his earlier failure, attributing his father's pecuniary losses and his own to the operation of the Corn Laws,[1] whose repeal became the greatest issue in his life.
Elliott became well known in Sheffield for his strident views on changes that would improve conditions for both manufacturers and workers, but was often disliked on this account by his fellow entrepreneurs.
The strength of his political convictions was reflected in the style and tenor of his verse,[1] earning him the nickname of "the Corn Law Rhymer", and making him internationally famous.
Inspired by a hatred of injustice, the poems were vigorous, simple and full of vivid description[1] and campaigned politically against the landowners in the government who stifled competition and kept the price of bread high.
[1] The Corn Law Rhymes marked a shift away from the long narratives that had preceded them, towards verses for singing that would carry a wider message to the labouring class.
The Corn Law Rhymes were initially thought to be written by an uneducated Sheffield mechanic, who had rejected conventional Romantic ideals for a new style of working-class poetry aimed at changing the system.
The final refrain parodies the British national anthem, God Save the Queen, and demands support for ordinary people instead.
[7] Elliott's relations with like-minded writers remained close, particularly with James Montgomery and John Holland, both of whom espoused other humanitarian causes.
[10] He also relates there how Elliott befriended the lecturer and writer Charles Reece Pemberton and helped to raise a subscription to support him when his health broke down.
One is a stirring exhortation to take a high theme in his poetry,[17] the other a humorous exercise in hexameters marking the measure as "in English undignified, loose, and worse than the worst prose", in response to verses sent him by Lister.
[19] In 1837 Elliott's business suffered from the trade recession of that year, but he still had enough money to retire in 1841 and settle on land he had bought at Great Houghton, near Barnsley.
[23] Still another tribute with the same title came from the labouring-class poet, John Critchley Prince, in his "Poetic Rosary" (1850)[24] Though honouring him as "No trifling, tinkling, moon-struck Bard" and "The proud, unpensioned Laureate of the Poor", it also acknowledged the elemental violence of his writing.
Hailing the "sullen pile of hard-won toilers' pence", and equally sceptical of the work of "moon-struck bards", he addressed the poet as one who "by song more hungry Britons fed/ Than all the lyric sons that ever sang".
[27] A long prose account of Elliott had appeared two years before his death in Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets by William Howitt (1792–1879).
[38] That same year the new Wetherspoons pub in Rotherham was named 'The Corn Law Rhymer', and in March 2013 a blue plaque commemorating the poet was placed on the town's medical walk-in centre, marking the site of the iron foundry where he was born.
