Writing in 1883 about the vocation of poetry, in a lecture entitled ‘The Poet as Seer and Singer’, Joseph Skipsey asserted that although a poet is ‘born with a golden bell in his soul, he may not be born with a silver spoon in his mouth’. The spoon in Skipsey’s mouth at birth may very well have been fashioned from coal. Born in 1832 at Percy Main, near Newcastle upon Tyne, during a tumultuous mining strike, Skipsey’s life would be touched early by disputes surrounding the working conditions and wages for the Northumbrian pitmen. At the age of twenty, Skipsey moved to London and worked briefly for the railway. In 1854 he married his landlady, Sara Ann Headley, and they soon moved north again, this time to Scotland and then back to the Northeast of England.