ABSTRACT
James Woodhouse is one of the most prolific labouring-class poets of the period, his career spanning from the mid-eighteenth to the early part of the nineteenth century. His poetry demonstrates his mastery of a range of forms, and his confidence in his own abilities is early witnessed by ambitiously lengthy locodescriptive verse and later culiminates in a two-volume vocational poem, written in couplets, that might be seen as a labouring-class version of Wordsworth's Prelude. The story of Woodhouse's career exemplifies both the changes and the continuity of conditions and opportunities for labouring-class poets during the eighteenth-century. Woodhouse gradually shifted from an almost slavish devotion to his patrons to a more self-assured and resistant labouring-class voice. Likened most frequently to Stephen Duck when he first published, Woodhouse is later connected with Ann Yearsley. Thus, as has been asserted with Ann Yearsley, Woodhouse may have felt that his yeoman background placed him above the lower classes.
