ABSTRACT
Noah Cooke was a carpet-weaver of Kidderminster, ‘of poor illiterate parents’ as he says in the short autobiography he offers by way of an Introduction to his principal volume Wild Warblings (1876). This was published by subscription, and printed at the office of a local paper, the Kidderminster Shuttle. Together with the subscription system, regional and local newspapers were increasingly important in the patronage and publication of the labouring-class poets in this period, both as a market for single poems (of which Cooke published very many) and as a potential printer-publisher for poetry volumes. The growth of ‘local interest’ as a key ingredient in the development of these papers favoured those poets who could incorporate local knowledge or language in their work, or present themselves as local ‘characters’, and the labouring-class poets could often do all these things. Cooke punningly remarks in his autobiography about his natural right as a weaver to use a ‘Shuttle’, and indeed he clearly made productive use of his role as a ‘friend’ to this newly established paper (see his poem of welcome, ‘A Quill for the Shuttle’, below).
