Darlington, 1879
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Hyslop, John (1837-92), of Kirkland, Dumfriesshire, landworker, engineering apprentice, letter carrier, known as ‘The Postman Poet’, pub. The dream of a masque, and other poems (Kilmarnock, 1882), Memorial volume of John Hyslop, the postman poet, ed. by William Johnson (Kilmarnock, 1895). Ref: Edwards, 4, 281-5 and 16, [lix]; Reilly (1994), 239; Murdoch, 313-16. [S] Hyslop, Mrs Sarah Jane, née Stewart (b. 1845), of Highland ancestry, raised in Loch Earn, Perthshire; educated until age 12, but at the death of both parents became a servant, age 13; sister of John Joseph Smale Stewart (qv); married the Kilmarnock postman-poet John Hyslop (qv), settled in Kilmarnock, and raised their children; poems include ‘Marion Neville: A Tale of Windsor in the Days of Queen Mary of England’. Ref: Edwards, 4, 348-53; Memorial volume of John Hyslop, the postman poet, ed. William Johnson (Kilmarnock, 1895), includes some of her poems and a short biography; inf. Kaye Kossick and Florence Boos. [F] [S] Ibbett, William Joseph, poetical postman, with a particular predilection for private printings—had a press of his own, and used other private presses, a friend of Buxton Forman, pub. Poems by Antaeus (privately published, n.p., 1889), first edn. Ref: inf. Bob Heyes; Charles Cox, Catalogue 42 (2001). ? Illingworth, John (b. 1846), of Allerton, Yorkshire, farmer, dialect poet, limited schooling; Holroyd prints ‘Towd Man’s Address to t’ Wife’, a sentimental poem reminiscent of the opening of Bloomfield’s ‘Richard and Kate’, written in an autobiographical style; pub. a pamphlet of four poems, Echoes of the Harp of Ebor (Bradford, 1870); also pub. temperance and dialect poems in local annuals and almanacks. Ref Holroyd, 63; Forshaw, 98-100. Ince, Thomas (1850-1902), of Bingley, Yorkshire, son of a soldier, educated in Wigan Union Workhouse, worked as a collier and labourer, studied medical botany, became a herbalist, moved to Blackburn, pub. Beggar Manuscripts: An Original Miscellany in Verse and Prose (Blackburn, 1888). Ref: Forshaw, 101-6 (includes a print of the poet); Burnett et al (1984), no. 367; Hull, 320-4; Maidment (1987), 270-2, 348-50; Reilly (1994), 240. Inglis, John (1813-87), of Hearthstone, Tweedsmuir, Peeblesshire, shepherd, later Edinburgh businessman, pub. Poems and songs (Edinburgh, 1866). Ref: Edwards, 5, 161-5 and 12, xxii; Reilly (2000), 241. [S] Inglis, John (b. 1857), of Hawick, Roxburghshire, framework knitter, tweed factory worker, emigrated to U.S. but returned, pub. The border land, and other poems (Kelso, 1879). Ref: Reilly (2000), 241. [S] Inglis, Robert Stirling (1835-86), of Heriot, Midlothian, shepherd’s son, shepherd, pub. Whisperings from the Hillside (Edinburgh, 1886; 2nd end 1888). Ref: Edwards, 10, 297-8; Reilly (1994), 241. [S] Ingram, William (1765-1849), of Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire, weaver, schoolmaster, pub. Poems in the English and Scottish Dialects (Aberdeen, 1812). Ref: Edwards, 12, 393-6. [S] Inskip, Thomas (c. 1780-1849), of Kimbolton, Northamptonshire, watchmaker, friend of Robert Bloomfield and John Clare (qqv), wrote ‘Epitaph on Robert Bloomfield,’ Bloomfield, Remains, I, 184-5; Cant, A Satire (1843), and other poems published in the Bedfordshire press; Amateur archaeologist and collector of roman relics, his collection now in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. His unpublished letters to Clare are in Northamptonshire Central Library, MS NMS 54, and in the BL, Egerton 2250. Inskip died of cholera in Hastings. Ref: MS sources as indicated; Powell, item 261 (this copy contains a verse-letter from Inskip to Clare); Bloomfield Circle; not in ODNB. Ironside, Daniel (b. 1825), of Bonnykelly, New Deer, cattle herder, joiner, religious poet. Ref: Edwards, 10, 400-2. [S] Irwin, Anne (b. 1835), of Slade, Ilfracombe, domestic servant, author of Combe Flowers: Poems, ed. by Elizabeth Marriott (Ilfracombe: John Tait, 1878, 2nd edn 1879); Autumn Berries: poems (Ilfracombe, 1889). Ref: Wright, 268-9, Reilly (1994), 242, Reilly (2000), 242, Bob Heyes. [F] Isacke, John, self-taught lodge-keeper of Stroud; pub. Leisure Hours (Stroud, 1859). Ref: Bob Heyes; Jarndyce, Cat. CLXIX, item 481, offering two manuscript poetry books. Isherwood, Gideon (b. 1860), of Blackburn, plumber, water inspector, later an invalid, pub. poems in the newspapers. Ref: Hull, 414-16. ? Jackson, Ferdinando, calico weaver of Rainow, Cheshire, pub. Poems, Descriptive and Miscellaneous (Macclesfield, 1829). Ref: Johnson, item 485. ? Jackson, John (fl. 1807-10), of Harrop Wood, near Macclesfield, friend of Bloomfield and other shoemakers, pub. An Address to Time, with other poems (Macclesfield: J. Wilson; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807); second edition of 1808 has an appendix of letters to friends including Bloomfield, who had sent him a copy of The Farmer’s Boy; copy described by Johnson (487) includes a letter ‘To Mr. G--, Shoemaker, Liverpool’. Also pub. Barythymia, a poem addressed to the Sons and Daughters of Adversity (1810). Ref: Johnson, 486-7; Bloomfield Circle, letters 205, 205a. ? James, James (1832-1902), Welsh weaver and co-author with his father of the Welsh national anthem; pub. collections in Welsh. Ref: DNB. [W] ? James, Joseph, confectioner, pub. The Workman’s Sabbath and other poems (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1859), 24 pages. Ref: Google Books (Goodridge (1999), item 59 may be another James Joseph). James, Maria (1795-1845), Welsh-speaker, emigrated with her family from Snowdonia to the USA aged seven to join a community of Welsh quarry workers in New York State; worked as a servant, apprentice lacemaker, servant again, to the Garretson family, who appear to have encouraged and patronised her poems, which were published in local magazines and newspapers; pub. Wales and Other Poems (New York: John S. Taylor, 1839; online via Google Books), edited and introduced by A. Potter, DD, of Union College, New York; they ‘offer rare and interesting insights into the experience of a nineteenth-century working-class woman poet’. Also included in Gramich and Brennan. Ref: Gramich and Brennan, 96-102, 399-400. [W] [F] ? James, Nicholas, author of ‘The Complaints of Poverty’ (using the pronoun ‘we’ for the poverty-stricken), pub. in his Poems on Several Occasions (Truro, 1742). Ref: Lonsdale (1984), 342-3, 846n. ? Japp, Alex H. (b. 1837), of Dun, Brechin, carpenter’s son, draper, attended Edinburgh University and became a journalist, pub. numerous prose works, and poems in newspapers and magazines. Ref: Edwards, 2, 106-11. [S] Jardine, James (b. 1852), of Broadmeadow, Ecclefechan, orphan, tweed factory worker, Hawick tweed merchant. Ref: Edwards, 2, 239-41. [S] Jeffrey, Agnes (b. 1848), of Peebleshire, raised in Stobo, where her father was employed by Montgomery family; at 13 left school and became a domestic servant until she married in 1875. Poems include ‘Jimmie Jenkins,’ ‘Balm and Briar,’ ‘Homely Things,’ and ‘Nae Freen’s Like Auld Freen’s.’ Ref: Edwards, 9, 337-40; inf. Florence Boos. [F] [S] Jeffrey, William Duthie (1845-92), of Fyvie, herd laddie, sawyer, shoemaker. Ref: Edwards, 8, 103-9. [S] Jeffryes, Alexander E. (b. 1874), of Dysart, Fifeshire, house-painter. Ref: Edwards, 14, 219-26. [S] Jennings, James (b. 1772), of Huntspill, Somerset, lacked formal education, worked in a Bristol chemist’s shop, encouraged by Southey, pub. newspaper essays in the Spectator, poems in magazines, and three vols, The Times, A Satirical Rhapsody (1794), Poems, consisting of the Mysteries of Mendip, the magic Ball, Sonnets, Retrospective Wanderings, and other pieces (1810), and The Prospects of Africa, and other Poems (1814). Ref Meyenberg, 214. Jewell, Joseph (1763-1846), of Stanford, Oxfordshire, farmworker, smuggler, ostler, working chemist, mother died at ten, pub. in verse A Short Sketch of a Long Life, accompanied by a Few Useful Hints (Newbury: printed by M.W. Vardy, 1840; Hereford: printed by Joseph Jones, 1846). Ref COPAC; copies in BL, Cardiff U and Society of Friends Library. Jewitt, Arthur (1772-1852), of Sheffield, cutler, schoolmaster, exciseman, better known as a topographer and miscellaneous writer but also a poet, author of ‘Peak Rhapsody’, a celebrated lyric on the beauties of the peak district, later set to music. Ref Burnett et al (1984), no. 384; ODNB; Wikipedia. Job, William, gardener of Bristol, pub. Poems on Various Subjects (1785). Ref: LC 3, 45-50; Alan Richardson, ‘Darkness Visible? Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry, 1770-1810’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, ed. Peter Kitson and Timothy Fulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 129-47. [LC 3] Jobling, Charlotte (fl. 1881), b. Belfast, lived in Glasgow, sailor’s daughter, pub. poems in the Glasgow Herald; widowed and moved back to Ireland, where she lived near Dublin; poet and folklorist; poems include ‘Overdue,’ ‘Blow Him Home,’ ‘At Her Feet,’ ‘Winifred Lee,’ ‘Liars,’ and the Scots ‘Pedlar’s Cream’. Ref: Edwards, 8 (1885), 296-302; inf. Florence Boos. [F] [I] [S] ? Johnson, Mary F. (fl. 1810 d. 1863), of Wroxall Farm, Isle of White, described herself in her volumes as a ‘secluded, unkown and inexperienced female’; pub. Original Sonnets and Other Poems (1810). Ref Meyenberg, 214; A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic Revival, 1750-1850, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 138-9. [F] Johnston, Ellen (c. 1835-1873), daughter of a stonemason who left his family to emigrate to the United States, where he committed suicide; her mother supported herself and her child as a dressmaker and milliner. At age eleven Johnston was forced by her stepfather to begin work in a factory, and she continued as a powerloom weaver for most of her life; pub. Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston, The Factory Girl (Dundee; Glasgow: W. Love, 1867; second edition 1869). Ref: LC 6, 101-30; ODNB; Wilson, II, 525-6; Burnett et al (1984), no. 389; Swindells, Julia, Victorian Writing and Working Women (Polity Press, 1985); Maidment (1987), 19; Boos (1995); Klaus (1998); ABC, 574-5; Reilly (2000), 249; Bradshaw, 287-8; H. Gustav Klaus, ‘New Light on Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Girl”’, Notes and Queries, 55, no. 4 (2008), 430-3; Boos (2008), 195-219; Simmons, 301-24, 366-90; inf. Florence Boos, Gustav Klaus. Link: wcwp [LC 6] [F] [S] Johnston, James (b. 1849), of Whitburn, plasterer. Ref: Edwards, 3, 335-6. [S] Johnston, James John (b. 1862), of Shetland, seaman's son, clerk, pub. in periodicals. Ref: Edwards, 5 (1883), 238-41. [S] Johnston, James M, a Belfast working man, pub. Jottings in verse (Belfast, 1887). Ref: Reilly (1994), 251. [I] Johnston, John (1781-1880), of Clackleith, Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire, sheep-farmer’s son, soldier, schoolmaster, pub. Lord Nelson: a poem, with a biographical sketch of his [Johnson’s] life by A.B. Todd (London, 1874). Ref: Reilly (2000), 249. [S] Johnstone, Alexander, of Paisley (fl. c. ?1840), gardener, no separate collection. Ref: Brown, II, 384-86. [S] ? Johnstone, James, stonemason and verse-writer, father of Ellen Johnston (qv), went to America. Ref: Valentine Cunningham, The Victorians (Blackwell, 2000), 749. [S] ? Johnstone, Jeannie (b. c. 1870), of Paisley, gardener’s daughter, After attending the John Neilson Institution, Miss Johnstone began work in a warehouse, and published poems locally. Ref: Brown, II, 526-28; inf. Florence Boos. [F] [S] Johnstone, John Craighouse (1761-1846), agricultural labourer, ?shoemaker, pub. Poems on various subjects but chiefly illustrative of the manners and superstitions of Annandale (Dumfries, 1820), Poems on various subjects, with additional poems and a memoir of the author (1857). Ref: Brown, I, 24-26; Winks, 313; Johnson, item 494. [S] Johnstone, Thomas (1812-70), of Paisley, apprenticed to watchmaker, unsuccessful so became a soldier and served in America, worked in a store in Liverpool and served as drill instructor, pub. posthumous collection, A Soldier’s Thoughts in Verse and Prose, with prefatory note by James M’Naught (Edinburgh, 1871). Ref: Brown, I, 24-26; Reilly (2000), 250. [S] Jones, Christopher, (fl. 1775-82), journeyman woolcomber, author of Sowton. A Village Conference: Occasioned by a Late Law decision (Crediton, 1775); The Miscellaneous Poetic Attempts of...an Uneducated Journeyman Wool-Comber (Exon./London: Freeman/Kearsley, [1786]), ‘by C. or G. Jones’. Ref: LC 2, 303-30; Monthly Review, 74 (1786), 146-7; Critical Review, 61 (1786), 398; Jackson (1985). [LC 2] ? Jones, Ebenezer (1820-60), Calvinist parentage; school educated; family reduced to poverty; ‘spasmodic’ poet, Chartist, pub. Studies in Sensation and Event (1843), fuller edition with life pub. 1879. Ref: Kovalev, 127-9; James, 172; Ashraf (1975), 200-8; Maidment (1987), 39; Scheckner, 165-7, 335; Schwab; DNB; Miles, V, 18; Ricks, 162-4. [C] ? Jones, Ernest [Charles] (1819-68), ‘spasmodic’ poet, Chartist. Through George Julian Harney (qv) met Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Co-edited The Labourer (chartist land plan journal) with Feargus O'Connor. After two-year imprisonment, took sole leadership of journals Notes to the People (1851–2) and The People's Paper (1852–8). Pub. poems in The Northern Star; The Battle Day and Other Poems (1855). Ref: ODNB; Kovalev, 135-79; James, 172-3; Vicinus (1974), 100-2; Ashraf (1975), 193-99; Burnett et al (1984), 359 (no. 817); Maidment (1987), 44-6, 67-73, 195-6; Rizzo, 242; Sheckner, 168-224, 335-6; Janowitz, esp. 173-94; Miles, IV, 547; Ricks, 326-7. [C] Jones, Henry (1721–1770), born at Beaulieu, near Drogheda, bricklayer poet, patron of Lord Chesterfield, pub. Vectis: The Isle of Wight, a poem, in three cantos (London, 1766; 2nd edn without ‘Vectis’, Isle of Wight: J. Mallet, 1782); Poems on Several Occasions (1749), numerous successful plays, The Relief, or, Day Thoughts, a Poem Occasion'd by ‘The Complaint, or, Night Thoughts’ (1754), “and several loco-descriptive pieces”: Kew Garden (1763), The Isle of Wight (1766), Clifton (1767), and Shrewsbury Quarry (1769). Ref: ODNB; LC 2, 1-40; Tinker, 95-7; Rizzo, 242; Christmas, 130-56; C. R. Johnson, cat. 49 (2006), item 33; Keegan (2008), 70-75. [LC 2] [I] Jones, Henry, Irish shoemaker, pub. Lucy a Dramatic Poem (c. 1775). Ref Christmas, 297-8. [I] ? Jones, John (fl. 1610-54), of Gelli Lyfdy in parish Ysgeifiog, Co. Flint, translator and copier in English, Welsh, French, Spanish, and Italian, antiquary, wrote most of his books as a debtor in Fleet Prison in London. Ref: Parry/Bell, 222-3. [W] [OP] Jones, John (b. 1740), of Bristol, farrier’s son, orphaned early and apprenticed to a stuff- weaver after a brief period of schooling. Later found patronage from a Dr Johnstone in Kidderminster and with his help, opened a school. Later became a vestry clerk. Pub. An Elegy on Winter, And Other Poems: To Which is Added, An Inscription to the Memory of the late Lord Lyttelton. By John Jones, School-Master in Kidderminster, Author of Poems on Several Subjects (Birmingham: 1779), which includes ‘Stanzas, addressed to Christopher Jones (qv), a poor Wool-comber, at Crediton, in Devonshire; author of two ingenious poems inserted in the Monthly Magazine’. The introduction includes the following information: ‘It ought not to be omitted that a few years before the death of the late Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Woodhouse, the ingenious author of a poem on the Leasowes, very obligingly presented a poem of our author’s to his Lordship, who having previously made acquaintance with his character by his friend Dr. Johnston, that nobleman expressed a desire to see him, and accordingly soon afterwards he was admitted to the honor of an interview at his seat at Hagley, where he has at all times since met with a most favourable reception, of which he makes a grateful acknowledgement to the present Lord Lyttelton, in his lines written in the Poet’s Walk.—Indeed, it was principally with a view of paying a tribute of gratitude to many kind friends and benefactors, that he yielded to the publication of this short account of his life, and of these Poems. January 12th, 1779’. Ref: COPAC; contributor. [—Bridget Keegan] Jones, John (b. 1774), servant, pub. Attempts in verse...With some account of the writer, written by himself, and an introductory essay on the lives and works of our uneducated poets by Robert Southey, Poet Laureate. Ref: LC 5, 17-24; ODNB; Southey, 1-14, 167-80 (see also Childers’s Introduction); Burnett et al (1984), no. 399; Maidment (1983), 84; Rizzo, 243; Richardson, 248. [LC 5] ? Jones, Mary (1707-78), of Oxford, daughter of a cooper, poor woman, eventually postmistress of Oxford, author of The Lass of the Hill (?1740); Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Oxford, London and Bath, 1750); and sixteen poems which appeared in Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755). Ref: ODNB; CBEL II, 368; Poems by Eminent Ladies (2 vols, 1755, includes life); Rowton, 151-3; Foxon 391; Lonsdale (1989), 155-65; Fullard, 559; Burmester, item 427 and 123 (image); Christmas, 95, 116; Johnson 46, nos. 202-3; Backscheider, 407; Backscheider & Ingrassia, 877. [F] Jones, William (c. 1809-55), of Leicester, Chartist and poet, worked as a glove hand and the 1851 census describes him as a ‘framework knitter and poet.’ His wife was a ‘Day School Teacher’ and his 21-year-old son was a bricklayer. He contributed to the Shakespearean Chartist Hymn Book in 1842 and assisted Thomas Cooper at his Adult Sunday School. In 1850, he wrote an article on ‘The Factory System vs. Frame Charges’ arguing against the iniquities of frame charges. He was initially a supporter of Fergus O’Connor, but like Cooper, distanced himself from him. He published two books of poetry: The Spirit; Or a Dream in the Woodland (London and Leicester, 1849) and Poems: Descriptive, Progressive, and Humorous (Leicester, 1853). He also contributed poems to the local papers and to the national Chartist press. Ref: Ref: Newitt, 23-44; Schwab, 198. [C] [—Ned Newitt] Jones, William Ellis (1796-1848), ‘Gwilym Cawrdaf’, Welsh poet and journeyman printer; pub. ‘To the Most Noble the Marquis of Bute, on the Opening of Bute Dock’ (London 1839); other works appear to be in Welsh and include an interesting romance sometimes described ‘as the first Welsh novel’, as well as at least eleven odes in Welsh. Ref: ODNB. [W] ? Jordan, Agnes C, of Leicester, ‘a soldier’s daughter, wife and mother’, pub. Poems; social, military, and domestic (London and Leicester, 1862). Ref: Reilly (2000), 250. [F] Jordan, John (1746-1809), ‘the Stratford poet’, wheelwright ‘of little education’; pub. Welcombe Hills, Near Stratford upon Avon; a Poem, Historical and Descriptive (London: printed for the Author, 1777), with subscription list; Original Collections on Stratford-upon-Avon, by John Jordan (1864) and Original Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Families of Shakespeare and Hart (1865), both edited by James Orchard Halliwell. Mair writes that Jordan’s poems were a failure, so he took on the identity of a ‘literary rustic with a folk-knowledge of Shakespeare’, and thus ‘Jordan’s Shakespearian Anecdotes and Traditions, some of them probably quite genuine, found their way into the note-books and memoirs of a good many visitors’ to Stratford. Ref: ODNB; John Mair, The Fourth Forger (1938), 16-17, 19; Poole, 169-73; Croft & Beattie II, 26-7 (item 101), includes a full-page reproduction of Jordan’s 1777 title-page with a large vignette of the Welcombe Hills. Jowitt, Jane (b. 1770), poor woman, pub. Memoirs of Jane Jowitt, the poor poetess, aged 74 years...written by herself (Sheffield: J. Pearce, 1844). The memoirs include poetry. Ref: Davis and Joyce, 156. [F] [—Dawn Whatman] Karsch, Anna Louisa (nee Dürbach, 1722-91), Silesian Cowherd, much studied ‘German peasant poet’; poems quoted in German and English in Kord’s study, which offers a short biography (263-5) and lists her pubs including poems in modern anths. (265, 292-3). Ref Kord. [F] ? Keats, John (1795-1821), major poet, son of an Ostler, whose humble origins formed a key plank in the savage critical backlash against him. Recent work on Keats, such as the monographs of Nicholas Roe and R.S. White and the Andrew Motion biography, emphasise the importance of class, politics and the habit of conscientious self-education in the poet’s development and life. ~ The exact proximity of Keats to the labouring-class poetic tradition is not easily determined. None of the recent critical commentators on the tradition (such as Klaus, Christmas, Keegan) have included him in their lists, but as far as the critics of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review were concerned, he was, like his mentor Leigh Hunt, an ill-educated, lower-class vandal, bent on wrecking the polite precincts of modern letters. John Gibson Lockhart, in a now notorious series of pseudonymous essays in the pages of Blackwood’s in 1817-18, identified Keats with Hunt and others in the circle that gathered in the pages of the Examiner as a ‘Cockney’. This term, which should strictly refer only to persons born within hearing of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in the London district of Cheapside, traditionally home to some of London’s poorest citizens, was used rather indiscriminately by Lockhart to condemn a band of poets who lacked respect for King and Church and Country, and wanted refinement in both their social and their poetic habits. ~ Keats was born in Moorgate in 1795 and thus was indeed in the technical sense a cockney, but his origins were somewhat removed from the lowest classes of the London poor. Although as Robert Gittings remarks in his 1968 biography of the poet, ‘we have no real knowledge at all of how Keats’s parents lived and worked in the first seven years of his boyhood’, there are enough salient facts to attempt a reconstruction. His father Thomas Keats was employed as a livery-stable manager at the Swan and Hoops inn, which was thriving in the stewardship of John Jennings, the poet’s maternal grandfather. When Thomas died in 1804, Jennings’ legacy to Frances, Keats’s mother, was £2,000, a sum described as ‘useful’; when John Jennings died a year later, he left £13,000, from which £1,000 and an annuity of £50 was provided for Frances. In short, the Keats family during the poet’s earliest years were financially comfortable, if not affluent. He may have been an ostler’s son, but William Sharp, Keats’s grand-nephew, rightly noted in 1892 that it would be a mistake ‘to assert that, like Jesus of Nazareth, the poet was born in a manger’. ~ Keats’s education was also significantly longer and more thorough than most labouring-class poets of the early nineteenth century experienced. In 1805, Keats’s mother remarried and moved to Edmonton, several miles north of the capital. In these years, he was schooled at the progressive Enfield College. Far from being ill-educated, as Lockhart supposed, Keats enjoyed not just Enfield’s ‘generous and humane community’ but made extensive use of its ‘remarkable’ library and the air of intellectual rigour that went hand-in-hand with its founders’ faith in a rational dissent with a distinctly radical, republican flavour, as Nicholas Roe has most thoroughly demonstrated. Keats was transformed under Clarke’s guidance from a pugnacious youth into a young man driven by a ‘continual drinking in of knowledge’. At 18, he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, and by 1815, the poet was studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London, becoming, a year later, a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, which permitted him to practise surgery. In the subsequent years of his life, cut short by consumption in 1821, he worked for a time as a medical dresser and junior house surgeon. The work was difficult, demanding and by no means well-remunerated, but it was a necessary stage in the apprenticeship for a promising medical career. His selection, from the hundreds of candidates, for the latter post is an indication of the promise that Keats was showing, despite reports that he sometimes struggled with his medical studies. That career was soon abandoned, however. He dedicated himself instead to poetry and to becoming, in his own words, a ‘great poet’. ~ Lockhart and others downplayed Keats’s schooling and professional training when they persisted in treating him as though he were a latterday Chatterton, ‘an uneducated and flimsy stripling’. The diminutive ‘Johnny Keats’ label they applied was intended to infantilise, as was the comment that he was a ‘boy of pretty abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil’. ‘It is a better and a wiser thing’, Lockhart counselled, ‘to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to “plasters, polls, and ointment boxes”…’. These are phrases redolent of Hannah More’s, to Ann Yearsley, about her milkwoman’s duties as “wife and mother” being prior to her calling as a poet, or Samuel Johnson’s casual dismissal of James Woodhouse (‘he may make an excellent shoemaker, but he can never make a good poet’). ~ In his fourth Cockney article, Lockhart made an explicit connection between Keats and the writers of what was rapidly emerging as a distinctive labouring-class literary tradition: ~ ‘Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be one other than the metromanie. The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind in her handbox. To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing—but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats’ ~ Modern critics, most forcefully Marjorie Levinson and Duncan Wu, have shown that Keats was not working-class, as several nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentators, following Lockhart and Byron, had supposed. Rather, Keats is best conceptualised as one troubled by the lack of a definitive social station, being neither wealthy, professional, nor artisanal. It is perhaps a dangerous essentialising of class experience to say, with Levinson, that he was caught between “the Truth of the working-class and the Beauty of the leisure class”, but Keats was certainly conscious of the need to resist any attempts to categorise him with the likes of Samuel Bamford, the weaver poet who had entered Hunt’s circle around the same time: ‘I am a weaver boy to them … the literary fashionables’, he lamented (Letters II: 186). ~ Keats’s professed love for the work of Burns might suggest an identification with the Scottish poet’s own class indeterminacy. In 1818, as part of his preparation for the poetic career and the ‘Life I intend to pursue … to write, to study, and to see all Europe at the lowest expence’, he visited Burns’s grave. It proved to be a strangely underwhelming experience. Still, the ribald sociality sometimes found in Keats’ early letters, usually interpreted as experiments with the Cockneyisms affected by Hunt and his circle, surely owes something to Burns too. In the account of the visit to Burns’ cottage, however, this ribald playfulness is replaced with a tone less social, more aggressive, and untypically superior. The account of the visit is dominated not by memories of Burns, but a most unpoetical character: a drunk man, selling whiskey while superintending the site. The man so disgusts Keats that he dreams of occupying a very different class position, imagining himself as employing ‘Caliph Vatheck’, the cruel vainglorious tyrant of Beckford’s novel, to have the drunkard ‘kicked’. Worse still, ‘his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet’. ~ Later in the letter, Keats laments the premature crushing of Burns’s ‘etherealisizing power of … imagination’. But the Burns he imagines is a travesty: ‘the fate of Burns, poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not!’ This deadening vulgarity is presumably a reference to Burns’s employment, in his last years, as an exciseman, rather than to Burns’s recurrent concern, in his poems and in his project of collecting the folk songs of Scotland, with his “fellow inmates of hamlet”, the ordinary working people amongst whom he was born and raised. Keats’s relationship with Burns, like that with Wordsworth, was by turns insightful and obscured by a prejudice born of his sense of a need to distinguish himself as a professional poet. ~ An examination of Keats’ poems for evidence of concerns in common with heav’n taught ploughmen, weaver boys and other working poets yields uncertain results. There is an expression, in the Fall of Hyperion’s opening lines, of a sense of disentitlement that is familiar enough. The feast that the poet stumbles upon in the forest is mostly consumed already, though he does not exactly starve; the poet here is, in Richard Cronin’s reading, an ‘interloper’, like ‘the servant who gains entry to a costly banquet after the authentic guests have left, and gluts himself on the rich remains’. Labour in the poems is generally, however, figured as something to be transcended or elided. The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ famously leaves behind ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’, and while ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ begins with the work of the weaving nuns and the Beadsman, performing spiritual labours in exchange for money, such semi-corporeal activities are soon subsumed into the romance. The ‘Ode to Indolence’ expresses a hope that the ‘voice of busy common sense’ may never be heard; and yet perhaps the desire for a life ‘steeped in honeyed indolence’ might have just the faintest echoes of the labour of the bees in it, and moreover, the Hyperion poet also shares a ‘vessel of transparent juice’ with the ‘wandered bee’. Yet even the bee, conventionally deployed since the Georgics of Virgil as a metaphor for human endeavour, belongs in Keats’s poetry to the world of opulent courtly luxury and tranquil sensory pleasures, as in an early poem, ‘Sleep and Poetry’: What is more soothing than the pretty hummer, / That stays one moment in an open flower / And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower’. Later poems, like, ‘To Autumn’ are more ambivalent: the season and the sun are together allotted most of Stanza one’s active verbs ‘to load’, ‘bless’, ‘bend’, ‘fill’, ‘swell’: only the bees, though, get to ‘think’. In Stanza 2, autumn is personified as a reaper and a gleaner, and as the mood turns elegiac in stanza 3, the several recent readings of the poem which align it with Keats’s sympathies for the radical protestors massacred at Peterloo in the month before the poem was written seem plausible. But the ‘Ode to Psyche’ is Keats’s most sustained use of labour-as-trope: the poet will ‘build’ a temple to thought and there, amidst birds and once again bees, ‘A rosy sanctuary will I dress / With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, … With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign.’ In general, however, Keats is usually faithful to Hunt’s conviction that the poem ‘the essence of poetical enjoyment does not consist in belief’ – in other words, a faith in the materiality of history and human practices – ‘but in a voluntary power to imagine.’ ~ None of this can finally resolve the complicated questions about class position and identification that have beleaguered Keats criticism since Blackwood’s. But the power of an Ostler’s son to imagine in such outrageous fashion, and to voluntarily quit one’s professional training for a career in poetry, testify to significant shifts occurring in the early nineteenth-century aesthetic and the literary marketplace for such aesthetic output, where Keats sought, all too briefly, his professional identity. Ref: For a meticulous reconstruction of Keats’s early years and the formative period at Enfield School, see Nicolas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). On Keats’s sense of his own social class position, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); on others’ sense of that position, especially Byron’s, see William Keach, ‘Byron reads Keats’ in Susan Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the political implication of the Cockney school’s style generally, see Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Richard Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); and Duncan Wu, ‘Keats and the “Cockney school”’, in Susan Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Keats has been richly served by biographical studies, of which those of Aileen Ward (1963), W. J. Bate (1963), Robert Gittings (1968), Andrew Motion (2003), R.S. White (2010) and Nicholas Roe (2012) are perhaps the most rewarding. see also Goodridge (1999), item 60; Powell, item 269-70; Miles, III, 1. [—Tim Burke] ? Keegan, John (1809-49), ‘Steel Pen’, Irish ballad writer and ‘peasant’; many pieces appeared in Dolman’s Magazine, The Nation, the Irish Penny Magazine, and the Dublin University Magazine, and are in Hayes’s Ballads of Ireland and the compilation The Harp of Erin; was preparing his own collection at the time of his death; collected legends and poems published in Dublin in 1907. Manuscripts of his poem ‘Caoch the piper’ (in MS.8117) and his ‘Commonplace book’ (microfilm n.5225 p.5329) of notes and poems are held at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Ref: ODNB; Sutton, 532. [I] Directory: 2015 2015 -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 2015 -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d 2015 -> Police Militarization 2015 -> Medical Radiography Program 2015 -> 2015 ihbb championships: hs history Bowl Round 4 – Prelims First Quarter 2015 -> Desk review yemen 2015 -> Wrtp/big step · 3841 W. 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