Ebenezer Elliott

Ebenezer Elliott (17 March 1781 – 1 December 1849) was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer for his leading the fight to repeal the Corn Laws which were causing hardship and starvation among the poor. Though a factory owner himself, his single-minded devotion to the welfare of the labouring classes won him a sympathetic reputation long after his poetry ceased to be read.

Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masbrough, in the Parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire. His father, (known as "Devil Elliott", for his fiery sermons) was an extreme Calvinist and a strong Radical, and was engaged in the iron trade. His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of a family of eleven children, of whom eight reached mature life, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood. At the age of six he contracted small-pox, which left him "fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind." His health was permanently affected, and he suffered from illness and depression in later life.

He was first educated at a dame school, then attended the Hollis School in Rotherham, where he was ‘taught to write and little more.’, but was generally regarded as a dunce. He hated school, and preferred to play truant, spending his time exploring the countryside around Rotherham, observing the plants and local wildlife. At about fourteen he began to read extensively on his own account, and in his leisure hours he studied botany, collected plants and flowers, and was delighted at the appearance of "a beautiful green snake about a yard long, which on the fine Sabbath mornings about ten o'clock seemed to expect me at the top of Primrose Lane." When he was sixteen he was sent to work at his father's foundry, working for the next seven years with no wages beyond a little pocket money.

In a fragment of autobiography printed in The Athenaeum (12 January 1850) he says that he was entirely self-taught, and attributes his poetic development to long country walks undertaken in search of wild flowers, and to a collection of books, including the works of Young, Barrow, Shenstone and John Milton, bequeathed to his father. His son-in-law, John Watkins, gave a more detailed account in "The Life, Poetry and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott", published 1850. One Sunday morning, after a heavy night’s drinking, Elliott missed chapel and visited his Aunt Robinson, where he was enthralled by some colour plates of flowers from Sowerby’s English Botany. When his aunt encouraged him to make his own flower drawings, he was thrilled to find he had a flair for it. His younger brother, Giles, whom he had always admired, read him a poem from James Thomson's "The Seasons" which described polyanthus and auricular flowers, and this was a turning point in Elliott's life. He realised that he could successfully combine his love of nature, and his talent for drawing, with writing poems and decorating them with flower illustrations.

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