![]() ![]() Elliott’s poetic opposition to the Corn Laws in The Village Patriarch (1829), The Ranter (1830) and the Corn Law Rhymes (1831) saw him become a well-known figure. The labouring poor, who survived on meagre wages, were highly sensitive to increases in bread prices. This activism saw his stern opposition to the Corn Laws which imposed taxes on imports of grain into Britain, thus raising the price of food. was, from his youth up, an uncompromising radical reformer, an eloquent, satirical man, unprepossessing in appearance, but endowed with a grim kind of humour and the power of attracting to himself to men of similar, though usually less definite, opinions. Certainly, Elliott never lost his sympathy for the labouring poor with whom he worked. Writing after his death John Watkins suggested that ‘he stern trade of this iron and steel man had its influence in the formation of his character, and imparted a strong tone to that of his son’. Known as the ‘Devil Elliott’ for his fiery Calvinist sermons and iron smelting business in Masbrough near Rotherham, Elliott described his father as ‘a little, broad-set, ill-favoured man’. Moreover, Elliot’s relationship with his father was fraught with difficulties. He was paid little and found the work gruelling. ![]() After a unhappy time spent at Hollis School in Rotherham where he was ‘taught to write and little more’ he began work at his father’s iron foundry. He contracted small-pox at age six, which left him ‘fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind’. Green, A Short History of the English people (1893), p.1763.Įlliott’s life began with a difficult childhood. Įarly nineteenth-century iron foundry similar to that with which Elliott worked. Writing in 1850, The Spectator, though resistive to Elliott’s ‘vulgar’ and ‘violent diatribes in verse’, acquiesced that Elliot ‘had more genius, power, pathos, and delicacy, than any “poet from the people” except Burns’. By the end of his life Elliot’s status was such that even his enemies in the Tory press had to recognise his power as a poet and political activist. Elliott’s poetry was popular amongst readers sympathetic to political reform and helped encourage working-class poetry in the burgeoning Chartist movement. His poetry was central to the development of Chartist verse, with Martha Vicinus referring to Elliot as the ‘single most important predecessor of Chartist poets’. Elliot was an active participant in the Chartist movement and the Anti-Corn Law campaign which earned him the title of the ‘Corn Law rhymer’. Commending his literary as much as his political skill, Dickens praised Elliott’s verses for their ‘tone of sincerity and earnestness-that fire and frenzy which they breathed, and which sent them, hot, burning words of denunciation and wrath, into the bosoms of the working classes-the toiling millions from whom Elliott sprang’. Īs Dickens notes, Elliott was both a well-known poet and political figure who worked tirelessly for the alleviation of the labouring poor with his writing. ![]() Elliott would have been a poet, in all that constitutes true poetry, had the corn laws never existed. THE name of EBENEZER ELLIOTT is associated with one of the greatest and most important political changes of modern times, with events not yet sufficiently removed from us, to allow of their being canvassed in this place with that freedom which would serve the more fully to illustrate his real merits. Wood engraving of Ebenezer Elliott from Howitt’s Journal published 3 April 1847 © National Portrait Gallery, LondonĬharles Dickens reflected on the life of impassioned political reformer and poet Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) shortly after his death:
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