Robert Story (poet)

There he was introduced to Divine Songs for Children, and discovered a love of poetry while reading on the hills, where he was employed first as a gardener from around 1807, but found more congenial service as a shepherd, an occupation commemorated in one of his lyrics, ‘Pours the spring on Howdsden yet’.

[1] Finding himself in financial difficulty, he wrote The Magic Fountain in 1829, and in 1834 he expressed poetic support for the Conservative Party, in a work entitled The Isles are Awake.

[1] During this period he also became associated with the Sun Inn Group, a collective of working class poets in Manchester named after the pub where they held their meetings, and he contributed to the their only published anthology, The Festive Wreath, in 1842.

[1] In 1843, Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government offered a small post for Story in the Audit Office, which saw him move to London.

[1] In 1845 he published Songs and Lyrical Poems (3rd edn, 1849), and in 1852 a versified tale of the heptarchy entitled Guthrum the Dane, a medieval romance.