ABSTRACT
Composed shortly before 7 January 1812. In Esd the poem is headed ‘1811’, but lines 1–79 were sent untitled to Elizabeth Hitchener on 7 January (BL MS adds. 37496 f. 78: Hitch. MS) with the comment: ‘the subject is not fictitious; it is the overflowings of the mind this morning. The facts are real; that recorded in the last fragment of a stanza is literally true. -The poor man said:-None of my family ever came to parish, and I wd. starve first. I am a poor man but I could never hold my head up after that.’ S. added: ‘Think of the Poetry which I have inserted as a picture of my feelings not a specimen of my art’ (L i 223–4). Although it had long been fashionable to write humanitarian poems ‘from facts’ (see Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA lxix (1954) 486–522), S.’s stay in Keswick had brought him into direct contact with the sufferings of the poor for the first time. He told Elizabeth Hitchener on 26 December 1811: ‘I have been led into reasonings which make me hate more & more the existing establishment of every kind. I gasp when I think of plate & balls & tables & kings. -I have beheld scenes of misery. -The manufacturers [i.e. factory-hands) are reduced to starvation.’ (L i 213). Again on 7 January: ‘Keswick seems more like a suburb of London than a village of Cumberland. Children are frequently found in the River which the unfortunate women employed at the manufactory destroy’ (L i 223). Keswick had a factory for making lead-pencils from the plumbago mined near Seathwaite, as well as a woollen mill. S.’s new style of sober narrative also reflects the 194influence of Southey’s ‘English Eclogues’ such as the well-known ‘Hannah’ and ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, and of Wordsworth, especially The Affliction of Margaret’ (published 1807; see notes), but S.’s radicalism is far more explicit.
