The name of Ebenezer Elliott is associated with one of the greatest and
most important political changes of modern times;—with events not yet
sufficiently removed from us, to allow of their being canvassed in this
place with that freedom which would serve the more fully to illustrate
his real merits. Elliott would have been a poet, in all that constitutes
true poetry, had the Corn Laws never existed.
He was born on 25th March, 1781, at the New Foundry, Masborough, in the
parish of Rotherham, where his father was a clerk in the employment of
Messrs. Walker, with a salary of 60_l._ or 70_l._ per annum. His father
was a man of strong political tendencies, possessed of humorous and
satiric power, that might have qualified him for a comic actor. Such was
the character he bore for political sagacity that he was popularly known
as “Devil Elliott.” The mother of the poet seems to have been a woman of
an extreme nervous temperament, constantly suffering from ill health,
and constitutionally awkward and diffident.
Ebenezer commenced his early training at a Dame’s school; but shy,
awkward, and desultory, he made little progress; nor did he thrive much
better at the school in which he was afterwards placed. Here he employed
his comrades to do his tasks for him, and of course laid no foundation
for his future education. His parents, disheartened by the lad’s
apparent stolidity, sent him next to Dalton School, two miles distant;
and here he certainly acquired something, for he retained, to old age,
the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his
way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary
training, he could do little or nothing with letters: he rather
preferred playing truant and roaming the meadows in listless idleness,
wherever his fancy led him. This could not last. His father soon set him
to work in the Foundry; and with this advantage, that the lad stood on
better terms with, himself than he had been for a considerable period,
for he discovered that he could compete with others in work,—sheer
hand-labour,—if he could not in the school. One disadvantage, however,
arose, as he tells us, from his foundry life; for he acquired a relish
for vulgar pursuits, and the village alehouse divided his attentions
with the woods and fields. Still a deep impression of the charms of
nature had been made upon him by his boyish rambles, which the debasing
influences and associations into which he was thrown could not wholly
wipe out. He would still wander away in his accustomed haunts, and
purify his soul from her alehouse defilements, by copious draughts of
the fresh nectar of natural beauty imbibed from the sylvan scenery
around him.
The childhood and youth of the future poet presented a strange medley of
opposites and antitheses. Without the ordinary measure of adaptation for
scholastic pursuits, he inhaled the vivid influences of external things,
delighting intensely in natural objects, and yet feeling an infinite
chagrin and remorse at his own idleness and ignorance. We find him
highly imaginative; making miniature lakes by sinking an iron vessel
filled with water in a heap of stones, and gazing therein with wondrous
enjoyment at the reflection of the sun and skies overhead; and
exhibiting a strange passion for looking on the faces of those who had
died violent deaths, although these dead men’s features would haunt his
imagination for weeks afterwards.
He did not, indeed, at this period, possess the elements of an ordinary
education. A very simple circumstance sufficed to apply the spark which
fired his latent energies, and nascent poetical tendencies: and he
henceforward became a different being, elevated far above his former
self. He called one evening, after a drinking bout on the previous
night, on a maiden aunt, named Robinson, a widow possessed of about
30_l._ a-year, by whom he was shown a number of “Sowerby’s English
Botany,” which her son was then purchasing in monthly parts. The plates
made a considerable impression on the awkward youth, and he essayed to
copy them by holding them to the light with a thin piece of paper before
them. When he found he could trace their forms by these means his
delight was unbounded, and every spare hour was devoted to the agreeable
task. Here commenced that intimate acquaintance with flowers, which
seems to pervade all his works. This aunt of Ebenezer’s, (good soul!
would that every shy, gawky Ebenezer had such an aunt!) bent on
completing the charm she had so happily begun, displayed to him still
further her son’s book of dried specimens; and this elated him beyond
measure. He forthwith commenced a similar collection for himself, for
which purpose he would roam the field still more than ever, on Sundays
as well as week days, to the interruption of his attendances at chapel.
This book he called his “Dry Flora,” (_Hortus Siccus_) and none so proud
as he when neighbours noticed his plants and pictures. He was not a
little pleased to feel himself a sort of wonder, as he passed through
the village with his plants; and, greedy of praise, he allowed his
acquaintance to believe that his drawings were at first hard, and made
by himself from nature. “Thompson’s Seasons,” read to him about this
time by his brother Giles, gave him a glimpse of the union of poetry
with natural beauty; and lit up in his mind an ambition which finally
transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who
wrote “The Village Patriarch,” and the “Corn Law Rhymes.”
From this time he set himself resolutely to the work of self-education.
His knowledge of the English language was meagre in the extreme; and he
succeeded at last only by making for himself a kind of grammar by
reading and observation. He then tried French, but his native indolence
prevailed, and he gave it up in despair. He read with avidity whatever
books came in his way; and a small legacy of books to his father came in
just at the right time. He says he could never read through a
second-rate book, and he therefore read masterpieces only;—“after
Milton, then Shakespeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine’s ‘Common
Sense;’ Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub;’ ‘Joan of Arc;’ Schiller’s ‘Robbers;’
Bürger’s ‘Lenora;’ Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall;’ and long afterwards,
Tasso, Dante, De Staël, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the ‘_Westminster
Review_.’” Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to
something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression
on such a mind as Elliott’s; and we have the fruit of this course of
study in the poetry which from this time he began to throw off.
He remained with his father from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year,
working laboriously without wages, except an occasional shilling or two
for pocket-money. He afterwards tried business on his own account. He
made two efforts at Sheffield; the last commencing at the age of forty,
and with a borrowed capital of 150_l._ He describes in his nervous
language the trials and difficulties he had to contend with; and all
these his imagination embodied for him in one grim and terrible form,
which he christened “Bread Tax.” With this demon he grappled in
desperate energy, and assailed it vigorously with his caustic rhyme.
This training, these mortifications, these misfortunes, and the demon
“Bread Tax” above all, made Elliott successively despised, hated,
feared, and admired, as public opinion changed towards him.
Mr. Howitt describes his warehouse as a dingy, and not very extensive
place, heaped with iron of all sorts, sizes, and forms, with barely a
passage through the chaos of rusty bars into the inner sanctum, at once,
study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends
connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were
plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of
the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which
marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he
began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of
20_l._ a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period
he built a handsome villa-residence in the suburbs. He now had leisure
to brood over the full force and effect of the Corn Laws. The subject
was earnestly discussed then in all manufacturing circles of that
district. Reverses now arrived. In 1837 he lost fully one-third of all
his savings, getting out of the storm at last with about 6000_l._, which
he wrote to Mr. Tait of Edinburgh, he intended, if possible, to retain.
The palmy days of 20_l._ profits had gone by for Sheffield, and instead,
all was commercial disaster and distrust. Elliott did well to retire
with what little he had remaining. In his retreat he was still vividly
haunted by the demon “Bread Tax.” This, then, was the period of the Corn
Law Rhymes, and these bitter experiences lent to them that tone of
sincerity and earnestness—that fire and frenzy which they breathed, and
which sent them, hot, burning words of denunciation and wrath, into the
bosoms of the working classes,—the toiling millions from whom Elliott
sprang. “Bread Tax,” indeed, to him, was a thing of terrible import and
bitter experience: hence he uses no gentle terms, or honeyed phrases
when dealing with the obnoxious impost. Sometimes coarse invective, and
angry assertion, take the place of convincing reason, and calm
philosophy. At others, there is a true vein of poetry and pathos running
through the rather unpoetic theme, which touches us with its
Wordsworthian feeling and gentleness. Then he would be found calling
down thunders upon the devoted heads of the monopolists, with all a
fanatic’s hearty zeal, and in his fury he would even pursue them, not
merely through the world, but beyond its dim frontiers and across the
threshold of another state. Take them, however, as they stand—and more
vigorous, effective, and startling political poetry has not graced the
literature of the age.
It was not to be supposed but that this trumpet-blast of defiance, and
shrill scream of “war to the knife,” should bring down upon him much
obloquy, much vituperation: but all this fell harmlessly upon him; he
rather liked it. When people began to bear with the turbid humour and
angry utterances of the “Corn Law Rhymer,” and grew familiar with the
stormy march of his verse, it was discovered that he was something more
than a mere political party song-writer. He was a true poet, whose
credentials, signed and sealed in the court of nature, attested the
genuineness of his brotherhood with those children of song who make the
world holier and happier by the mellifluous strains they bring to us,
like fragments of a forgotten melody, from the far-off world of beauty
and of love.
Elliott will not soon cease to be distinctively known as the “Corn Law
Rhymer;” but it will be by his non-political poems that he will be
chiefly remembered by posterity as the Poet of the People;—for his name
will still be, as it has long been, a “Household Word,” in the homes of
all such as love the pure influences of simple, sensuous, and natural
poetry. As an author he did not make his way fast: he had written poetry
for twenty years ere he had attracted much notice. A genial critique by
Southey in the “Quarterly;” another by Carlyle in the “Edinburgh;” and
favourable notices in the “Athenæum” and “New Monthly,” brought him into
notice; and he gradually made his way until a new and cheap edition of
his works in 1840 stamped him as a popular poet. His poetry is just such
as, knowing his history, we might have expected; and such as, not
knowing it, might have bodied forth to us the identical man as we find
him.
As we have said, Nature was his school; but flowers were the especial
vocation of his muse. A small ironmonger—a keen and successful
tradesman—we should scarcely have given him credit for such an exquisite
love of the beautiful in Nature, as we find in some of those lines
written by him in the crowded counting-room of that dingy warehouse. The
incident of the floral miscellany: the subsequent study of “The
Seasons;” the long rambles in meadows and on hill-sides,
specimen-hunting for his _Hortus Siccus_;—sufficiently account for the
exquisite sketches of scenery, and those vivid descriptions of natural
phenomena, which showed that the coinage of his brain had been stamped
in Nature’s mint. The most casual reader would at once discover that,
with Thompson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshipper of
Nature—a wanderer by babbling streams—a dreamer in the leafy
wilderness—a worshipper of morning upon the golden hill-tops. He gives
us pictures of rural scenery warm as the pencil of a Claude, and glowing
as the sunsets of Italy.
A few sentences will complete our sketch, and bring us to the close of
the poet’s pilgrimage. He had come out of the general collapse of
commercial affairs in 1837, with a small portion of the wealth he had
realised by diligent and continuous labour. He took a walk, on one
occasion, into the country, of about eighteen miles, reached Argilt
Hill, liked the place, returned, and resolved to buy it. He laid out in
house and land about one thousand guineas. His family consisted of Mrs.
Elliott and two daughters—a servant-maid—an occasional helper—a Welch
pony and small gig,—“a dog almost as big as the mare, and much wiser
than his master; a pony-cart; a wheel-barrow; and a grindstone—and,”
says he, “turn up your nose if you like!”
From his own papers we learn that he had one son a clergyman, at
Lothedale, near Skipton; another in the steel trade, on Elliott’s old
premises at Sheffield; two others unmarried, living on their means;
another “druggisting at Sheffield, in a sort of chimney called a shop;”
and another, a clergyman, living in the West Indies. Of his thirteen
children, five were dead, and of whom he says—“They left behind them no
memorial—but they are safe in the bosom of Mercy, and not quite
forgotten even here!”
In this retirement he occasionally lectured and spoke at public
meetings; but he began to suffer from a spasmodic affection of the
nerves, which obliged him wholly to forego public speaking. This disease
grew worse; and in December, 1839, he was warned that he could not
continue to speak in public, except at the risk of sudden death. This
disorder lingered about him for about six years: he then fell ill of a
more serious disease, which threatened speedy termination. This was in
May, 1849. In September, he writes, “I have been _very, very_ ill.” On
the first of December, 1849, the event, which had so long been
impending, occurred; and Elliott peacefully departed in the 69th year of
his age.
Thus, then, the sun set on one whose life was one continued heroic
struggle with opposing influences,—with ignorance first, then trade,
then the corn laws, then literary fame, and, last of all, disease: and
thus the world saw its last of the material breathing form of the rugged
but kindly being who made himself loved, feared, hated, and famous, as
the “CORN LAW RHYMER.”
* * * * *
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