ABSTRACT
This poem, written with WG, was published anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 41 (January 1837), pp. 48–50. Writing to Mary Howitt in August 1838, EG described WG’s recent lectures to Manchester weavers on ‘The Poets and Poetry of Humble Life’, adding that ‘We once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor, rather in the manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a more seeing-beauty spirit; and one – the only one – was published in Blackwood, January 1837. But I suppose we spoke of our plan near a dog-rose, for it never went any further’ (Letters, p.33). The poem was probably written in the summer of 1836. EG had been reading Crabbe, as well as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dryden and Pope in preparation for a project on English poets earlier in the same year (see Letters, p. 7). The poem was reprinted in the Temperance Star in 1897, and in the Knutsford edition (Knutsford, vol. i, pp. xxii–xxv). Much later EG acknowledged that the figure of Mary in the poem was ‘the germ’ of Alice Wilson in Mary Barton (Letters, pp. 82, 533; see also the Introduction to Mary Barton, this edition, Volume 5, and Sharps, p. 28, n. 14 for the similarities between the two). Writing to John Blackwood in March 1859 she recalled her pleasure at the poem’s publication, adding that ‘I sent some articles, in prose, afterwards to Blackwood, – but they were, as I now feel, both poor & exaggerated in tone; & they were never inserted’ (Letters, p. 533). For the influence of Wordsworth, and also that of the Lancashire poet Samuel Bamford on the poem, see Uglow, pp. 101–5.
