Labourers expressed fight for social justice in thousands of lines of verse
In 1841, AW’s poem To The Sons Of Toil was first published in the radical newspaper the Northern Star, which had a circulation of 50,000 and readership of half a million:
How comes it that ye toil and sweat
And bear the oppressor’s rod
For cruel man who dare to change
The equal laws of God?
How come that man with tyrant heart
Is caused to rule another,
To rob, oppress and, leech-like, suck
The life’s blood of a brother?
Nothing is known of AW: he or she is one of the lost voices of the Chartist movement, one of the thousands of working men and women who turned to verse to express their hopes for social justice.
Their work has been uncovered by Michael Sanders of Manchester University’s school of arts, histories and cultures after a reading of more than 1,000 poems by up to 400 Chartist and working-class poets published in the Northern Star between 1838 and 1852.
Extract taken from;
Lost voices of Victorian working class uncovered in political protest poems
David Ward, The Guardian, Thursday March 15, 2007