Very Rare. OCLC records only two copies of this first edition: one at the University of London in the Goldsmiths’-Kress library of economic literature and the other at Brigham Young University (seemingly bound with a later edition of Elliott’s poems). Two further editions appeared the following year (printed and published in London) which added more poems before a collected works which was published in 1833. This very rare first printing of Elliott’s important poem was known to Jackson and included in his Bibliography of Romantic Poetry (online via the University of Toronto) but he was unable to examine a copy due to the rarity.
The very rare first appearance of the radical poem “The Ranter” by the so-called Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, who wrote powerful, popular and celebrated verse which attacked the ‘bread tax’, the exploitation of child and adult labour, the punitively low wages of the working classes, and the suppression of free trade. This remarkably rare little publication was printed (and most likely distributed by hand) in Sheffield, the heartland of the poor and oppressed industrial north of England that Elliott depicted in verse.
Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) was born in Rotheram in Yorkshire to a politically radical iron-founder father, the trade that Elliott himself would later take up when he joined his father’s failing business as a young man. Elliott received a large amount of money when he married in 1805 but disastrously invested this in his father’s company and the fortune was soon lost when the foundry was declared bankrupt. Elliott managed, with the assistance of a loan, to move his family (consisting of eight children) to Sheffield where he setup, very successfully, in the cutlery trade. Elliott’s early life experiences and a passion for literature culminated in his own radical political views and his passion for writing poetry inspired by the Romantic writers but deeply rooted in the working people that he knew so well. Wordsworth was a fan of Elliott’s verse and Robert Southey read and responded to his verse.
This book begins with The “Declaration” by John Carr, secretary of the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread Tax Society (a society founded by Elliott himself) which states:
“Convinced that the Mechanics are the only body of men in this country sufficiently independent to oppose, with any chance of success, the host of corruptionists who are not only feeding on our labour, but limiting the market for our productions; trusting also that we shall speedily be joined by every wise and good Mechanic in the empire and supported by the yet undebased portion of the middle class of our countrymen, if any such there be, we, the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread-tax Society, declare, that, in a full peopled country, it is an act of national suicide to restrict the exchange of manufactured goods for corn, because, where there exists a law which restricts the necessaries and comforts of life, profits and wages being no where worth more than the necessaries and comforts which they will purchase, are demonstrably measured by restriction”
Elliott’s poem, “The Ranter” centres on the character Miles Gordon, a labourer and radical preacher who protests against the injustices he sees around him in the industrial North of England, he declares:
“Oh, rise, blest morn, unclouded! let they sin
Shine on the artizan, thy purest air
Breathe on the bread tax’d labourer’s deep despair!
Poor sons of toil…“ (A2r).
Miles Gordon describes the life of his wretched landlady (a “many childed widow”) who struggles to survive while the rich industrialists around her prosper:
“Thou doest not know, thou pamper’d son of sloth
Thou can’st not tell, thou bread-tax-eating thief,
How sweet is rest to bread-tax’d toil and grief…“ (p.4)
“The Bread Tax had by now become a vital political issue and it was the poor who suffered most. Through the dumb misery of that period, mothers made brand dumplings for their children and scrabbled shamelessly in rubbish dumps for potato peelings. Men turned to pigfood and horse beans. ‘On a wage of 8s’ related one survivor, ‘bread was reckoned at three half pence a mouthful!’ Tea leaves were begged from the more prosperous households, that they might be pathetically re-used. Elliott’s more personal and immediate response was with the Corn Law Rhymes. **The poetry was in the pity but it was pity transfigured by passion by a thrusting directness that could not be ignored”** (Ebenezer Elliott (the Corn-Law Rhymer) 1781–1849 p.7).
The Northampton Mercury on 9th April 1831 drew attention to a letter written by a correspondent to Robert Southey in The New Monthly and London Magazine:
“…calling his attention to ‘a remarkable Poem by a Mechanic, entitled, ‘Corn Law Rhymes.’ ‘The Ranter,’ and published at Sheffield by order of the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread-Tax Society. The distinguished notice thus publicly claimed for this hitherto obscure Poem, is fully justified by the passages which the writer of the letter has extracted. They are evidently the effusions of a vigorous and highly political mind, and one, if we mistake not, which must have sooner or later forced itself upon the public attention, even without the friendly aid of the ‘Letters.’ The statement that the Author is a ‘Mechanic’ may be true; a ’common mechanic he clearly is not; but, on the contrary, a man well educated and studious. **We shall no doubt hear more of him before long.”** (Northampton Mercury, 9th April 1831).
Elliott’s reputation later went on to have a second life in America as a champion of the poor and distressed. The American poet and anti-slavery writer James Russell Lowell praised Elliott and a number of editions of his poems were published in Philadelphia in the middle of the 19th-century.
As late as 1949, in by far the best bibliography of Elliott to date, the compilers of Ebenezer Elliott (the Corn-Law Rhymer) 1781–1849 (Sheffield City Libraries and Rotherham Public Library, [1949]) were unable to locate a copy, but conjectured (correctly) that the text in question ‘contains no poem but The Ranter’.
Provenance: J. O. Edwards, small book label on the inside of the upper wrapper. Sold as part of Edwards’ collection at Forum in April 2024 (where it made practically nothing) to a UK book dealer and subsequently sold to Maggs.
