Well we should have, it’s a fascinating repository of insights into the cotton famine, crucially all written at the time, hence it’s such an invaluable resource.
There are hundreds of poems, frequently by writers of the working classes, if not actual hungry unemployed cotton workers. It’s fair to say the quality varies but many of them display a high level of skill and sophistication. They reveal a very broad range of voices and views, some very powerful anti slavery, and some not. Many of the writers just want the American civil war to end, regardless of who won, and the supply of cotton to resume so that people could get back to work and feed their families. That Lancashire cotton workers refused to work the cotton picked by slaves is clearly a rather romantic interpretation of events. But when economics turn grim it’s always the poorest who suffer the most, how could they be expected to think of anything but their own survival in the face of such hunger and starvation? There’s also poetry written in America, some of which seems to be in response to the Lancashire poems, and vice versa, as if there was a thriving to and fro of argument and opinion going back and forth across the Atlantic. So the poems were actually an important aspect of the battle for public opinion, the propaganda war. But at their best they take us into the moment, and reveal to us first hand the pain and suffering the US civil war wrought upon the folks of Lancashire.
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AuthorMick Martin is a writer and theatre maker. Archives
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