ABSTRACT
These ten lines are drafted in ink in Nbk 10 on the otherwise blank f. 60r rev. The draft, which has no title, is relatively clean with only a few revisions. As People of England, ye who toil and groan (no. 281) is drafted on either side of it—ff. 57v rev. to 59r rev., continuing on 60v rev. and 61r rev.—What men gain fairly was probably in place before S. completed drafting that longer fragment. Mary included the lines in 1840 under the title Fragment XIX, though she removed line 7, and assigned no date to them. Rossetti 1870/1878 grouped the nine lines of 1840 with other fragments of 1819. Forman 1876–7 iv 7–8 combined the 1840 text with the first six and a half lines of People of England, which Richard Garnett had transcribed from Nbk 10 and published in Relics, entitled the resulting fifteen and a half lines Fragment: To the People of England and dated them 1819, conjecturing ‘I think there can be little if any doubt that the whole sixteen lines, hitherto printed apart, belong together’. When, in preparing Huntington Nbks, Forman came to examine the draft in Nbk 10, he altered his opinion only a little:
The occurrence of the heroic quatrain [i.e. ll. 5–8], now restored by the insertion of the suppressed line 7, lessens slightly the likelihood that this was part of the poem To the People of England, which, fragmentary and unfinished as it is, was, I scarcely doubt, intended for a poem in heroic couplets.
(Huntington Nbks ii 182–3)