ABSTRACT
Samuel Laycock was one of the most successful of the many labouring-class dialect poets who emerged in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire in the nineteenth century. Born in Marsden, near Huddersfield, Yorkshire, he worked in a mill from the age of nine. Aged eleven, he moved with his family to Stalybridge near Manchester, where he worked as a powerloom worker. Laycock’s verse was critically well-regarded, and his 1893 volume was warmly received by the regional and national press. The Manchester Guardian, for example, wrote: The poems express with great truth and vigour the feelings and sentiments of the average Lancashire workman. The Guardian is certainly right about the ‘good lyric swing’, and perhaps about how well Laycock represented the ‘average Lancashire workman’.
