Public Lecture: Newcastle Corn Riots Project

       'The Bard may die, the Thresher Survive':
         The Poetry of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier

         
       Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)
                Wednesday 26 May 2021, 7.30pm.

Public lecture presented to the Newcastle Corn Riots Project (Heaton History Group), funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Joicey Trust and Newcastle City Council.

This lecture will focus upon two texts that respond directly to one another: Stephen Duck’s ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (1730), and its witty riposte by Mary Collier, ‘The Woman’s Labour’ (1739). The son of a Wiltshire farm worker, Duck educated himself by studying the poetry of Milton, Dryden, and Addison, and rose to fame as the favourite ‘Bard’ of Queen Caroline. Having received no formal education as a washerwoman from Hampshire, Collier was inspired to reply to what she saw as Duck’s severity ‘on the Female Sex’ in his defence of the male labourer. What is most significant about both authors is the way that they appropriated the conventions, style, and metre of ‘highbrow’ poetry to criticise (or reinforce) contemporary attitudes towards agricultural workers. Writing during an era in which the literary elite sought to imitate the forms of the Roman ‘golden age’ for political purposes, this lecture will consider the extent to which Duck and Collier complicate popular assumptions about the racial, class and gender identity of eighteenth-century poets. By contextualising both authors within a period of harsh lawgiving, food shortages, and an expanding commercial economy, it will also question whether their reliance upon patronage ensured that labouring-class voice was romanticised, distorted and ultimately silenced.

March Reading Group Session

                      ‘Combination and Confederacy’:
Radical Protest and Chartism on Tyneside, 1819-1839

Neil Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Law (Northumbria University)

Tuesday 23 March 2021, 4-6pm

On 25 July 1839, the Mayor of Newcastle, John Fife, issued a warning to ‘certain Persons calling themselves Members, and acting as Members, of a Society or Societies of an illegal Character’. He declared that all such persons are ‘Guilty of a COMBINATION and CONFEDERACY’,  and warned that they would suffer severe fines or a possible prison sentence of up to three months.

When scholars consider the impact of the Chartist movement, they tend to focus upon the movements in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Yet in its early years Chartism in Northumberland and Durham attained a vehemence which was rarely matched elsewhere. Activity in the North East took on a striking militancy in the years following the Peterloo Massacre. On 11 October 1819, a crowd of protesters gathered on the Town Moor calling themselves the Great Reform Meeting, and this inspired a group of leaders who rose to prominence in the following decades. One of the most influential Chartist newspapers originated in Newcastle, which promoted the Charter’s Six Points of Parliamentary reform. As time went on, the movement assumed a greater ascendancy, and its language took on a more pronounced tone of violence. By February 1839 Newcastle was one of three areas in the country attracting attention from the Home Office because of suspicion that arms were being assembled. In the Spring, outdoor meetings drew increasingly large numbers to hear speeches by local and national leaders.

During Summer 1839, the movement was inflamed by Parliament’s refusal to consider the National Petition. The magistrates of the North East were ill prepared to deal with disorderly action, and remained passive while the Chartists grew steadily in strength and more reckless in language. However, in July two incidents in Newcastle alarmed the law enforcers. In conjunction with the military, they hastened to take steps which deterred most workers from answering the call for a general strike in August, and thus enabled them to cope with the few who did. These events in the North East present a striking illustration of how masses of people were swept up in the turbulence of early Chartism, and how rapidly Chartist strength dissipated when it encountered robust police resistance.

In our reading group meeting, we are going to examine a range of texts that provide an historical record of radical protest and Chartist activity in Newcastle upon Tyne. These include banners, extracts from newspapers such as the Morning Post, Newcastle Courant and Northern Liberator, and examples of Chartist poetry. In particular, we are going to focus upon the intersections between radical politics and print culture, and consider how Chartist activity in Newcastle became transformed into a rhetorical weapon by its supporters and critics alike. 

Please email northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com for the reading materials and Zoom link.