ABSTRACT
George Richardson was, from stern necessity, placed to business at a very early age. At fourteen Richardson was placed as a clerk in a ‘foreign export house of high respectability’, which congenial advancement allowed him time to pursue his original enthusiasm for art, although this did not displace his typically rapturous admiration of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Burns and Byron (the latter he describes as being of ‘gigantic mind’). He hopes that in thought or sentiment, wherein he has more especially vindicated that “nurseling of truth divine”, Liberty, nothing will be found to offend the most fastidious mind’ (Patriotism: In three Cantos, and other Poems, (1844), pp. v–vi). His deep religious faith did not preclude him from delivering a mordant critique of the established Church, nor did it prevent his ambition seeing Christ’s egalitarian compassion for the poor as established within the body politic on this earth, not in the world to come.
