ABSTRACT
In choosing as my subject Crabtree and his Publishers I hoped to pursue, and possibly attain, three objectives-which might or might not be said to be correlative.
First I wished to view the Poet against the background of his accoucheurs. Secondly I hoped to discover some of the reasons which might account for what an earlier Orator has so accusingly called ‘a neglect amounting almost to a conspiracy of silence’. Thirdly I needed, partially at least, to vindicate those members of my trade who implicitly had come within the strictures meted out on those generations who had suffered the weeds of neglect to strangle and obscure for too many years the poetic blooms which sprang from Crabtree’s fertile soil.
