ABSTRACT
This chapter reaches back over a century before Cassell’s Working Man’s Friend to explore the rich classical engagement of labouring poets who left their humble jobs only if they could finance themselves by the pen. The supposed transformative potential of a Classics education is reduced to the transformation of young cows into ‘asses’, dimwitted beasts of burden. The extravagance and futility of her expensive journey to the capital to translate the mundane ‘turnip’ into a classical language reveals how detached Miss Lee at number three is from the reality facing Stalybridge during the 1860s Cotton Famine. The subject of classical presences in working-class poetry is vast, unexplored and can here be only cursorily surveyed. Broadsides generally ignore Classics altogether or satirise them, projecting contemporary earthly hierarchies onto a ‘lang syne’ mythological plane inhabited by gods as well as mortals, thus absurdly emphasizing the class biases of the present.
