Abstract
Burns, Bloomfield and Clare represent rural communities that are threatened by change, but something of the old world always remains. Ebenezer Elliott represents an utterly transformed rural world that is unrecognisable to the returning travellers in The Village Patriarch (1829) and The Splendid Village. He is a transitional figure in several ways. His most significant poetry was published in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and, as such, straddles the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Poor-Law Amendment Act of 1834.1 He was influenced by several of the great Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Crabbe, but stylistically and thematically he anticipates Chartist poetry.2
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Notes
Elliott’s family were middle class; his father rose to be master of an iron foundry at Masbrough in Rotherham. He attended school until the age of 16, when he began work in his father’s foundry, but by then he had developed a consuming interest in nature, politics and poetry. See Mark Storey, ‘Introduction’, in Selected Poetry of Ebenezer Elliott, ed. Mark Storey (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), p. 14.
See Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 115–32.
See Humphry Southall, ‘Mobility, the Artisan Community and Popular Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in Urbanising Britain: Essays on Class and Community in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gerry Kearns and Charles W.J. Withers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 103.
Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987), p. 15.
See Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 193–207.
See Jeffrey G. Williamson, Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 219–305.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, trans. Florence Kelley Vischnewetsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 96.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 184.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 231.
John Stevenson, ‘Social Aspects of the Industrial Revolution’, in The Industrial Revolution and British Society, ed. Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 239.
See, for example, Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols, trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. Ernest Mandel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Vol. 1, pp. 873–940.
See William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 1–32.
As is also the case today the banker appears to have done very well, and looks with scorn upon those who have suffered as a consequence of his activities. There is a consensus among economic historians that, during the nineteenth century, bankers and financiers were allowed to. There is a consensus among economic historians that, during the nineteenth century, bankers and financiers were allowed to ‘pursue speculative interests to the detriment of long term economic growth’ (Samuel Knafo, ‘The State and the Rise of Speculative Finance in England’, Economy and Society, 37:2 (2008) 172–92 (173)). Speculation would obviously push up commodity prices too, which would have a direct impact on the cost of provisions for labouring people. But many bankers were opposed to the Corn Law, which for Elliott was the primary cause of poverty in Britain during the 1820s and 1830s. Bankers were also prominent amongst the membership of the Anti-Corn Law Association established in 1836.
Michael Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 91.
See Susan M. Koger and Deborah Du Nann Winter, The Psychology of Environmental Problems, 3rd edn (Hove, Sussex: Taylor and Francis, 2010), pp. 327–8.
See Keith Morris and Ray Hearne, Ebenezer Elliott, Corn-Law Rhymer and Poet of the Poor (Rotherham: Rotherwood Press, 2002), pp. 31–43.
Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Claeys (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 58.
Stanley Pierson, ‘The Way Out’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, 2 vols, ed. Harold James Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge, 1973), Vol. 2, p. 881.
See also J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 56–62.
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, p. 182. His view had a negative impact on the reception of Owen’s ideas during the second half of the nineteenth century (Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 298–306).
Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 48. See also Bunce, The Countryside Ideal, pp. 113–40.
See Amanda Bingley, ‘Health, People and Forests’, in Making Sense of Space: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Ian Convery, Gerard Corsane and Peter Davis (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 107–16.
See John Towner, A Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World, 1540–1940 (London: John Wiley, 1996), pp. 232–3.
See David M. Ricci, Good Citizenship in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 80–108.
John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–1985, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 36–7.
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 2nd edn (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1902), p. 9.
That is, flat [fool]; take the wall [walk on the inside of the footpath]. See Francis Grose, The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (London: Senate, 1994).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 253.
See Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 172.
See F.M.L. Thompson ‘Introduction: The Rise of Suburbia’, in The Rise of Suburbia, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 8–9. See also Burnett, A Social History of Housing, p. 110.
See W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Countryside’, in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Vol. 1, Religions and Communities, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 110.
John Proctor ‘Introduction’, in Village Schools: A History of Rural Elementary Education from the Eighteenth- to the Twenty-First-Century in Prose and Verse, ed. John Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10.
C. Michael Hall and Stephen J. Page, The Geography of Tourism and Recreation: Environment, Space and Place, 3rd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1969), p. 286.
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© 2013 Simon J. White
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White, S.J. (2013). Ebenezer Elliott, the Industrial Revolution and the Rural Village. In: Romanticism and the Rural Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_7
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