ABSTRACT
‘I believe that from my cradle I was doomed to become an author’ (Ashton and Roberts, p. 32)––and such was the fate of Thomas Miller, ‘the English Burns and Nottinghamshire basket-maker’, a remarkably prolific poet and one of the relatively few labouring-class writers. Miller became an energetic autodidact, befriended Thomas Cooper, the Chartist (q.v.), and soon joined the coterie of Nottinghamshire writers known as ‘the Sherwood Foresters’. Following numerous publications in local newspapers and magazines, he published ‘Songs of the Sea Nymphs: Scenes in Fairy Land’ (1832) and was sufficiently fired by his success to move to London. The DNB cites some of Miller’s most important prose works as: Royston Gower, or the Days of King John a novel in two volumes, 1838; Gideon Giles the Roper, 1840, second edition, 1841, a tale of humble life rendered interesting by truthful and vigorous delineation.
