The Creation of Ulster Labouring-Class Poetry, 1790–3

Samuel Thomson’s preface to his debut volume Poems on Different Subjects reflects a self-confident authorial voice which appears to shun the critical elite for an audience of labouring peers. Such self-confidence accrued from a growing fashion across the ‘long’ eighteenth century for labouring-class poetry, most famously exemplified in Stephen Duck (1705?–56), Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and Robert Burns, poets who enjoyed unprecedented levels of critical and public interest.1 The popularity of these writers was undoubtedly assisted by trends in mid-century poetry, exemplified by Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) which sought to promote the potentiality of rural ‘mute inglorious Milton[s]’, and a fashion for primitive bardic, origin figures like Macpherson’s Ossian (Gray, 2003, p. 332, l.59). In addition, the Scottish ‘vernacular revival’ produced a tradition of national georgic, known also as the ‘Cotter tradition’, whereby poets presented the rural scene from the perspective of the nameless labouring figures of Gray’s Elegy, creating sympathy with and, in Burns’s case, rehabilitating the Scottish Dissenting figures of the poem. Since the 1980s, work by a vast array of critics has rehabilitated many labouring-class figures as individual poets, particularly Duck, Burns and Clare.2 More recently, Samuel Thomson, independently of his circle, has become a regular study among these rehabilitated poets.3