ABSTRACT
From his early years, Richard Furness was possessed by such a craving for literature that as a young apprentice leather-worker he forged orders to obtain books (to his later shame and regret). His enjoyment of stolen knowledge was equally hazardous, for he read secretly through the night with a candle in a box, ‘the lid resting on his head’, and a hide of leather ‘hung on the inside of the door, so that no light could be seen through the chinks of it’ (Poetical Works, p. 14). Furness published an epic poem in 1836, Medicus-Magus (re-named as The Astrologer), proudly dedicated to the miners of the Peak District, ‘being of the same stock’. His stated aim was to ‘rescue’ the discourse of ‘Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Normanic terms, employed in the working of mine and minerals’ (Medicus-Magus, p. vi), before it became extinct.
