ABSTRACT
According to records uncovered by Edward Chicken's nineteenth-century editor, William Cail, Chicken gained his majority in the Incorporated Company of Weavers in 1718. He was later chosen elector in 1720, clerk in 1721, and steward and clerk in 1723. Chicken's proximity to the White Cross earned him the affectionate appellation 'the Mayor of White Cross' from his contemporaries. There remains some confusion over the date and first publication of The Collier's Wedding. Cail records that in manuscript the poem was originally tided 'A Trip to Elswick', but that the title was changed to its present one, and a note appended to the manuscript in Chicken's hand indicating the poem was 'written in the year 1729'. The fifth edition was reissued several times in the early nineteenth century, before Cail attempted to sanitize the poem for polite ears by revising or expurgating bawdy passages and coarse language for his 1829 version.
