Darlington, 1879

? Chalmers, Robert (1779-1843), of Paisley, tobacconist and grocer, weather-forecaster, pub. poems and a pamphlet: Observations of the Weather in Scotland, showing what kind of Weather the various Winds produce, and what Winds are most likely to prevail in each Month of the year; also, a Garden Calendar adapted for Cottars and Others (1839). Ref: Brown, I, 142-45. [S]

Chalmers, Robert (1862-96), of Aberdeen, ropemaker from age eight, pub. in newspapers. Ref: Edwards, 9, 326-30. [S]

Chambers, James (1740-182?), of Soham, Cambridgeshire, ‘itinerant poet’, pedlar and net-maker, seller of verses and acrostics. According to fellow writer John Webb (qv), Chambers could read but could not write. He seems to have been a familiar figure in and around Suffolk. Pub. The poetical works of James Chambers, itinerant poet with the life of the author (Ipswich, 1820). Ref: LC 4, 139-58; Johnson, item 177; Cranbrook, 58, 174-5; John Webb, ‘Haverhill’, ll. 159-62 in Haverhill, A Descriptive Poem, and Other Poems (London: J. Nunn, 1810). [LC 4]

? Chandler, Mary (1687-1745), daughter of a dissenting minister, Malmesbury, Wilts., milliner, self-educated poet, pub. A Description of Bath: a poem (published anonymously as ‘a letter to a friend’, London, 1736); knew Mary Barber (qv). Ref: ODNB; Foxon, C107; Lonsdale (1989), 151-5; Fullard, 552; Burmester, 110; Rowton 125-6; Christmas, 31; Johnson 46, no. 162; Backscheider, 405; Backscheider & Ingrassia, 871. [F]

Chandler, Reuben, ‘a working man of School House, 8 Pinfold Street, near New Street, Birmingham’, pub. Onward & Upward: Temperance Poetry, melodies, recitations, rhymes, and dialogues, with religious and moral musings, 2nd edn (London and Birmingham, 1862), The Temperance life-boat crew reciter and melodist, 2nd enlarged edn (London, Manchester and Birmingham, 1867). Ref: Reilly (2000), 90.

Chapman, James (1835-88), of Upper Banchory, Kincardineshire, son of a blacksmith, farm worker, asylum attendant, later worked in a detective office and as a sanitary officer in Partick, pub. A legend of the isles, and other poems (Partick and Edinburgh, 1878), ‘Ecce homo’ and other poems (Partick, 1883), The Scots o’ lansyne, and other poems (Glasgow, 1888). Ref: Edwards, 2, 318-23; 12, xxii and 16, [lix]; Reid, Bards, 113-14; Murdoch, 296-302; Reilly (1994), 90; Reilly (2000), 91. [S]

Chapman, Thomas (‘Joseph’, 1844-88), of Falla, Lanarkshire, self-educated, cowherd, ploughman, policeman, rose to Sergeant, pub. Contentment and other poems (Kelso, 1883). Ref: Edwards, 4, 69-72; Reilly (1994), 91. [S]

Chapman, Thomas Learmonth (b. 1824), of Beancross, Falkirk, herder, tenant farmer, President of the Woodend Burns Club, pub. prose in local press, poems in Bisset. Ref: Bisset, 128-32. [S]

Charlton, John, (‘Little John the Poet’, 1804 to c. 1883), of Blackburn, cobbler poet and singer, born in Lymm, Cheshire. Ref: Hull, 153-9.

Chatt, George (d. 1890), of Hexham, Northumberland, agricultural labourer, soldier, edited West Cumberland Times, pub. Miscellaneous Poems (Hexham: Courant Office, 1866), ‘The productions of a farm labourer, in the few scattered hours of leisure snatched from a toilsome occupation’. Ref: Reilly (2000), 92; inf. Bob Heyes.

? Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), of Bristol, major poet of humble origins, posthunous son of the writing master of St Mary Redcliffe Pile Street School, friend of James Thistlethwaite (qv), amateur antiquarian and ‘forger’ of medieval poems and manuscripts. An apprenticeship with a legal scrivener left him many hours to himself, and while he had always had an interest in antiquarianism and genealogy, this period is probably the time he took up his medieval writing in earnest. The ‘Rowley’ writings were the fruit of this leisure time [ODNB]. As Thomas Rowley, Chatterton wrote poems, plays, literary letters, biographies, architectural and antiquarian reports. His books of antiquities include ‘Battle of Hastynges I’ (1768), ‘Craishes Herauldry’ (1768), ‘The Tournament’ (1768), ‘The Bridge Narrative’ (a supposed thirteenth-century account pub. in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal); posthumously pub. Poems, Supposed to have beeen written by Thomas Rowley and others (1777); Miscellanies (1778); The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, A Bicentenary Edition, ed Donald S Taylor in association with Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), two vols. Immensely influential, especially on the Romantic poets and the Pre-Raphaelites. His supposed suicide in a London garret at the age of 17, on which an immense mythography has been based, is now seriously contested (see ODNB). Ref: LC 2, 353-62; ODNB; Radcliffe; Powell, item 152; Meyenberg, 207; Keegan (2008), 75-8; Sutton, 194 (numerous manuscripts and letters); E. H. W. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton (1930), the standard biography; Donald S. Taylor, Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Nick Groom (ed), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999); Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow (London: PIcador, 2002); Daniel Cook, Thmas Chatterton and Neglected Genius 1760-1830 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013). [LC 2]

Cherry, Andrew (1762-1812), of Limerick, son of a printer and bookseller, went on the stage ‘while only a boy, and, after hard struggles, made a moderate fortune and some reputation by his acting’, m. the dau of the theatre manager Richard Knight and bacame a manager himself; died on tour with his company at Monmouth; well known as the writer of popular songs like ‘The Bay of Biscay’, ‘He was Famed for Deeds of Arms’, ‘The Dear Little Shamrock’ and ‘Tom Moody’; six of his song are in Hercules Ellis, Songs of Ireland, second series (1849) Also pub. or wrote for performance (unpub. work noted as such): Harlequin in the Stocks, pantomime (1793); The Outcasts, unpub. opera (1796); The Soldier's Daughter, comedy (1804); All for Fame, unpub. comic sketch (1805); The Village, unpub. comedy (1805); The Travellers, musical drama (1806); Thalia's Tears, unpub. poem (1806); Spanish Dollars, musical entertainment (1806); Peter the Great, operatic drama (1807) A Day in London, unpub. comedy (1807). Ref Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, April 1804 (portrait and biography); O’Donoghue, 66. [I]

? Chetwood, William Rufus (William Chetwode, d. 1766), of Dublin, prompter at Drury Lane Theatre, London, for thirty years. Pub. or wrote for performance Kilkenny ; or. The Old Mans Wish, poem (Dublin, 1748); The Generous Freemason, ballad opera (1731); The Lover’s Opera, musical piece, (1729); The Stock Jobbers; or The Humours of Change Alley, comedy (1720); South Sea ; or, The Biter Bit, a farce (1720), and miscellaneous works including a A Tour Through Ireland (1746) and A General History of the Stage (London, 1749). Ref O’Donoghue, 67. [I]

Chicken, Edward (1698-1746), of Newcastle upon Tyne, weaver’s son and weaver, later opened a school, pub. The Collier’s Wedding (Newcastle upon Tyne, 173?), Foxon C147, Lonsdale (1984), 216-18, 843n, reprinted 1829, variant text printed in David Wright (ed) The Penguin Book of Everyday Verse; No;...This is the Truth (1741, Foxon C148). Ref: LC 1, 53-72; ODNB; Allan, 5-7; Klaus (1985), 62-4; Welford, I, 546-9. [LC 1]

Chippendale, Thomas (d. 1889), of Waddington near Clitheroe, orphaned and moved to Blackburn, weaver, insurance agent, moved to Nelson then Edinburgh. Ref: Hull, 355-61.

Chisholm, Isabella (fl. 1865-82), travelling tinker, a principal source of poems, songs and incantations for Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gaelica collection (Edinburgh, 1900). Ref: Boos (2008), 116-20. [F] [S]

Chisholm, Walter (1856-77), Berwickshire shepherd lad, leather warehouse porter, pub. in newspapers, and pub. Poems, by the late Walter Chisholm, ed. with a prefactory notice, by William Cairns (Edinburgh and Haddington, 1879). Ref: ODNB; Reilly (2000), 93; Edwards, 2, 62-7; Crockett, 198-204. [S]

Christie, J. Knox, of Paisley, printer’s assistant from age eight or nine, postman, bookseller (in Brown as ‘J. R. Christie’), pub. Many moods in many measures: Poems in fifty varieties of verse (Glasgow, 1877). Ref: Edwards 1, 19-30; Brown, II, 415-17; Murdoch, 373-78; Reilly (2000), 95. [S]

Christie, William (‘Stable Boy’), of Hexham, Northumberland, pub. Three leal and lowly laddies: Mauricewood pit disaster, Midlothian, September 1889 [poems ‘to the memory of three pony boys, by a stable boy’] (Manchester, 1889). Ref: Reilly (1994), 93 (Manchester Public Library).

? Clancy, L. T., Chartist poet, author of a cycle of poems, ‘Scraps for the Radicals’, pub. in The Northern Star. Ref: Kovalev, 111; Scheckner, 128, 331; Schwab, 187. [C]

Clark, Charles Allen (‘Teddy Ashton’, 1863-1935), of Bolton, Lancashire, working-class parents, worked in cotton mill, journalist, edited popular Teddy Ashton’s Weekly, wrote communist fiction, founder of Lancashire Authors’ Association, pub. ‘Voices’ and other verses (London and Manchester, 1895). Ref: Reilly (1994), 95.

? Clark [or Clarke], Ewan, author of Miscellany Poems (Whitehaven, 1779); The Rustic, a poem in four cantos (1805). Ref: CBEL II; inf. Brian Maidment, Johnson, item 18.

Clark, Hugh, ‘Heone’ (b. 1832), of Ardrossan, Ayrshire, farmboy, shopman, pub. Poems for the Period (1881). Ref: Edwards, 6, 352-62. [S]

? Clark, J., author of Bethlem a Poem. By a Patient (1744, Foxon C225, ?only copy in Guildhall Library, Dobell 301). Ref: Foxon, Dobell.

Clark, James (d. 1868), ploughman, tenant farmer, of Glenfarquhar, the Mearns, poems pub. by (and along with those of) his son William Clark (qv), as Leisure Musings (1894). Ref: Reid, Bards, 119-20. [S]

Clark, Robert (1811-47), of Paisley, weaver, emigrated to America, returned to Scotland, but sailed for America again and ship sunk, pub. Original Poetical Pieces, Chiefly Scottish (Paisley, 1836), Random Rhymes (1842). Ref: Brown, I, 452-54; Leonard, 182-3. [S]

Clark, William (d. 1868), tenant farmer, of Glenfarquhar, the Mearns, pub. his poems along with those of his late father James Clark (qv), as Leisure Musings (1894). Ref: Reid, Bards, 120-1. [S]

? Clavell, John (1601-1643), highwayman poet. After moving to Dublin in 1635, he enjoyed successful dual careers as physician and lawyer, despite doubtful qualifications. His commonplace book remains, containing some original, some copied verses—and letters and medical prescriptions. Pub. A Recantation of an ill led Life (1628). Ref: ODNB, Southey. [OP]

Cleaver, Thomas, Night and Other Poems (1848). Ref: Maidment (1987), 124-6.

Cleghorn, Jane (b. 1827), of Port Glasgow, orphaned daughter of a shipmaster who was wrecked on the coast of Wales when she was 4, received a scanty education, and earned her living since age ten; later left a widow with her aged mother and young child to provide for, and worked as a hairdresser; pub. poems in Glasgow and other newspapers; poems include ‘The Temple of Nature,’ ‘The Aged Widow to Her Wedding Ring,’ ‘Oor Ain Fireside,’ and ‘Woman’s Mission’. Ref: Edwards, 6, 366-70; inf. Florence Boos. [F] [S]

Cleland, Alexander (1863-85), son of a colliery workman, apprentice journeyman tailor, died at 22 in an enteric fever epidemic. Ref: Knox, 159-62. [S]

? Clephan, James (1804-88), of Monkwearmouth Shore, son of a baker, apprentice printer and bookseller, editor of the Gateshead Observer (a paper of national reputation), pub. Hareshaw burn; Evening on Hexham “seal” and other poems (Stockton-on-Tees, 1861), The bishop’s raid, with other poems (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1864). Ref: ODNB, Allan, 43, Welford, I, 593-6, Reilly (2000), 97.

? Clifton, Harry (1832-72), of Hoddeston, Herts., orphaned around age 12 to 15, educated in Cheshunt, apprenticed in a circus as rider and clown, later achieved music hall success as singer and lyricist/composer, wrote the broadside ballad, ‘Polly Perkins, of Paddington Green’ and was know for his ‘motto’ songs of advice (example: ‘Work, Boys, Work, and Be Contented’). Ref: Hepburn, II, 449-51.

? Close, John (1816-Feb. 15th 1891), ‘Poet Close’, of Gunnerside, Swaledale, Yorkshire, son of a butcher and lay preacher from Stephen, Westmoreland, assisted his father from 1826-46; then in 1846, he became a printer at Kirby Stephen and kept a bookstall at Bowness on Windermere. He was granted a Civil List pension of fifty pounds on April 1861, but it was cancelled by Lord Palmerston 3 June 1861, before it had received royal signature; he was eventually, however, granted 100 pounds from the royal bounty fund. These events seem to have garned Close some notoriety, for they were featured in the periodical Byrne’s Gossip of the Century in an article titled ‘Poet Close and his pension: shewing how it was got, who took it from him and what the queen sent him from the royal bounty 1861’ (1892, I, 249-51; also apparently featured in The Illustrated London News, Feb 1891 p. 239). Biographer Frederick Boase notes, “He indited some verses to the king of Bonny [referring perhaps to his 1862 publication], who created him his poet laureate, but unfortunately for the poet no salary was attached to the office.” Pub. numerous vols including: The Satirist, or, Every Man in his Humour (Appleby, 1833); The Poetical Works, etc. of John Close (Kirkby Stephen, 1860, in five parts); The wise man of Stainmore: or, tales and legends of old time (1864); Bowness Church Bells and other Poems (1872); Poet Close's Christmas Book, Containing, Memorial of His Late Royal Highness Prince Albert; The Black Man’s Visit to Poet Close; Drops from the Spring; New Sketches, New Poems; Capt. Hudson’s Mesmerism, &c (Kirkby Stephen, 1862); Poet Close at the Lakes. Dedicated to Everybody. Part II (Kirkby Stephen: J, Close, [1865]); Poet Close in Carlisle and Scotland; and, a Night with Jacob Thompson, the Celebrated Westmoreland Painter; Shap Abbey, and the “Wise Men” of Kendal; Grand Cluster of the Barnsley poets, &c. (Kirkby Stephen, 1866); Poet Close’s New Poem on the Late Awful Fire at his Bookstall, Bowness, Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland (?Kirkby Stephen, 1875). Ref: ODNB; Frederick Boase, Modern English Biography: Containing Many Thousand Concise Memoirs of Persons who Have Died Since the Year 1850, with an Index of the Most Interesting Matter, Vol. 4, (printed for the author by Netherton and Worth, 1908), 692; Reilly (2000), 98-9; Sutton, 209 (manuscripts and letters). [—Katie Osborn]

Close, John George, linen wrapper of Belfast, pub. Echoes of the Valley (Belfast, 1879). Ref: Reilly (2000), 99. [I]

Clounie, Thomas (b. 1867), of Kirkcudbright then Blackburn, draper. Ref: Hull, 440-5. [S]

Coaker, Jonas (1801-1890), The Dartmoor poet, servant-boy, later labourer, publican, parish tax-collector, most of his work printed in fragments but pub. A Sketch of the several Denominations in the Christian World; with a short account of Atheism, Judaism, and Mahometanism [verse] (Tavistock, 1871). Ref: Wright, 99-101.

Coates, James, labourer, Bridlington-Quay, a Descriptive Poem (2nd edn., Scarborough, 1813); A Description of Burlington Key and Neighborhood [in verse] (Gainsborough, 1805); A Pathetic Elegy on the Death of W. Brown and C. Choddick, who Suffered on the Tempestuous Night of Oct 30th, 1807, while Engaged in the Herring-fishery (York, 1808). Ref: Johnson, items 192-3.

Cochran, John, of Paisley, drawboy, weaver, coal seller; pieces in newspapers. Ref: Brown, II, 418-20. [S]

Cochrane, Robert (b. 1854), of Paisley, turner, tenter, poems in Brown. Ref: Brown, II, 444-51. [S]

Cock, James (1752-1822), of Elgin, weaver, became overseer at linen factory in 1796, Hamespun Lays, or the Simple Strains of an Untutored Muse (1806; Aberdeen, 1810, 1824); Simple Strains; or the Homespun Lays of an Untutored Muse (Aberdeen, 1810). Ref: Edwards, 2, 181-2 and 16, [lix]; Johnson, items 198-9. [S]

Colburn, George (b. 1852), of Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire, farm labourer, grocer, spent time in America, pub. Poems on Mankind and Nature (1891), and in prose and verse in periodicals. Ref: Edwards, 5, 64-70; Reid, Bards, 121-3. [S]

Coldwell, Peter (1811-1892), of Lauder, grocer, wrote humorous poems and recitations, pub. in Crockett. Ref: Crockett, 335-9. [S]

Cole, Charles, described as ‘The Weaver of Keighley’, but on the title page of Political... Poems as ‘a London Mechanic’, by Ashraf as a ‘mechanic’, by Sheckner as a ‘Little-known worker-poet’, and by Schwab as Secretary of the Unitee Operative Weavers of London—so this may possibly be a conflation of two authors, but could equally well describe a single career. Pub. Political and Other Poems (London: W.C. Mantz, 1833, 2nd edn 1834, both these in BL); ‘A poetical address to his grace the Duke of Wellington’ (1835); poems in the radical papers in the 1840s and 1859s (see Scheckner). Ref: Ashraf (1978), I, 13, 24, 43-4; Kovalev, 120-1; Scheckner, 129-32, 331; Schwab, 188; inf. Bob Heyes.

Coles, John (b. 1775), of Weedon Lois, Northamptonshire, son of John and Hannah Coles, shoemaker, agricultural labourer, pub. with Joseph Furniss (qv), Poems Moral and Religious (1811), stating in the preface, ‘We are plain unlettered men; having never received the advantages of an education [...] from our childhood to the present time we have been under the necessity of labouring hard for our daily support’. Ref: Hold, 53-4.

Collier, Mary (1688?-1762), farm and general worker, born near Midhurst in Sussex and led a long working life. She had no formal education, having been taught to read when very young by her mother. In delineating the seasonal drudgery working-class women are locked in, and railing against such inequities as the women’s double-shift, The Woman's Labour (1739) embodies a rejoinder to Stephen Duck’s paean to male labours, The Thresher's Labour (1736). At 246 lines, it is wittily written in the old folk mode of the ‘argument of the sexes’, and also comments upon the relation between private vices and public welfare with a lack of deference that illuminates the humbug about ‘national’ wealth, and may partly account for the shortage of patronage. Collier spent several years nursing her sick father before relocating to Petersfield in Hampshire after his death, where she worked as a washerwoman and itinerant household brewer until the age of 63. She retired to a garret in Alton, last being identified in her 72nd year composing a poem in honour of the marriage of George III. Collier is one of several eighteenth-century plebeian poets who have been revived and anthologised since the 1980s. Although the absence of letters and eminent patrons has meant that the particulars of her life remain cloaked in obscurity, she stands unmistakably as a seminal poetic spokesperson for the common woman. Pub: The Woman’s Labour (1739); ed. Moira Ferguson (Augustan Reprint Society, 1985); ed. E.P. Thompson (Merlin, 1989). Also published were Poems (1762 and ?1820) and The Poems of Mary Collier (1765?). ‘To a Friend in Affliction’ and ‘Verses Addressed to Mrs Digby’ were featured in Vol. 2 of The Lady’s Poetical Magazine (4 Vols, 1781-82). Ref: LC 1, 311-48; ODNB; Unwin, 73-4; Tinker, 94-5; Christmas, 115-29; Fullard, 553; Lonsdale (1984), 325-6; Klaus (1985), 3-18; Keegan 2003; Lonsdale (1989), 171-3; Milne (1999), 100-38; Milne (2001); Phillips, 214-16; Rizzo, 243; Shiach, 51-3; Kord, 260-1; Backscheider, 405; Donna Landry, ‘The Resignation of Mary Collier’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century, (1987), 35-8 and in The Muses of Resistance 38-40, 56-77; John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Part I; H. Gustav Klaus, ‘Mary Collier (1688?-1762)’, Notes and Queries, new series, 47, no. 2 (2000), 201-4; William Christmas, ‘An Emendation to Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour’, Notes and Queries, 246 (March 2001). [F] [LC 1] [—Iain Rowley]