ABSTRACT
The anonymous author of A Poem descriptive of the Manners of the Clothiers creates a speaker, and several other characters, who work in the Yorkshire woollen trades before the factory system was instituted. The intimate details of a clothier's labouring life and the use of dialect argue for labouring-class authorship, but no concrete evidence has survived. In fact, the date '1730' is more speculative than the title suggests, as it is presumed to have appeared on the manuscript 'in the possession of John Bischoff, Esq., Leeds' from which the poem was taken. Bischoff's manuscript has apparently been lost, but a fair copy of it has been preserved in the Leeds Public Library. The lack of confirmatory evidence notwithstanding, the poem does offer a semi-idyllic picture of the northern woollen trades at the early to mid-century period. The poem has been discussed in many standard social histories of the period, including those by Herbert Heaton, Ivy Pinchbeck, E. P. Thompson, and Bridget Hill.
