'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.
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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.
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