ABSTRACT
A conventionally educated master-staymaker, with a reasonable income of almost £300 per year, may lack the cast-iron labouring-class credentials but few have espoused the workers’ cause with Robert Peddie’s incendiary vigour or suffered greater privation for that allegiance. Peddie takes his stand with Chartist radicals like Thomas Cooper (q.v.), George Binns and Ernest Jones, men who believed—contrary to W. H. Auden—that poetry could make something happen, translated the fervour of discontent into rousing political rhetoric and were imprisoned for their defiance. During his imprisonment, Peddie had access to pen and paper only once a month; his poems had to be held in his head until he could write them out, and his letters were censored. Some slipped the net and appeared in the Northern Star and the Chartist Circular, including ‘Langsyne’, ‘Ode to Freedom’ and ‘A Voice from Beverley’.
