Introduction

Summary

The Northern Star's poetry column for 18 May 1839, carries a factory reform poem written by a woman known to history only as E. H., ‘a Factory Girl of Stalybridge’. In this poem entitled, ‘On Joseph Rayner Stephens’, E. H. compares her position with that of the millowners' children and wives. The contrast she draws between their advantages purchased, she believes, at the cost of her own class's impoverishment is a common rhetorical device in early Victorian social discourse. Less familiar, perhaps, is the content of this trope, for E. H. protests her cultural deprivation as bitterly as any material deprivation:

Their children, too, to school must be sent,

Till all kinds of learning and music have learnt;

Their wives must have veils, silks dresses, and cloaks,

And some who support them can't get linsey coats.

Two stanzas later E. H. returns to the question of cultural entitlement – ‘If they had sent us to school, better rhyme we could make, / And I think it is time we had some of their cake’. In this simple rhyming couplet E. H. attests to poetry's importance in the working-class movement. Here poetry is figured as a luxury rather than a fundamental necessity – cake rather than bread – but nonetheless it is something to which E. H. believes she is entitled. In her imagination, poetry equates with plenty; it signifies the desire for ‘something more’, the ‘something better’ which impelled Chartism.