ABSTRACT
At fifty William Heaton was pressed by economic necessity to abandon his semi-rural existence as a weaver in the Yorkshire village of Luddenden for the town of Halifax and the mechanized pandaemonium of Crossley’s Carpet Manufactory. Heaton’s enclosure within the factory ‘bastile’ literalizes Wordsworth’s trope on the withering of the romantic imagination when ‘shades of the prison-house’ come down––but his regret for lost autonomy and contact with the natural world is also inextricably bound with his self-figuring as a romantic poet. After repeated attempts to publish in periodicals, often receiving ‘nothing in return but abuse’, Heaton’s poem, ‘I Love to Walk in the Twilight Grey’, appeared in the Leeds Intelligencer of 24 May 1845. After years of discontent in the carpet factory, it may be consoling that Heaton’s romantic pastoralism found a practical, if circumscribed, application when he became ‘well enough known as a poet of nature to be made the caretaker of Halifax’s first public park’.
