The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-65)

In the 1860s global politics had a profound effect on a local economy when, during the American Civil War, the Union blockaded cotton exports from the Confederacy, and the main raw material of much of Lancashire's industry was cut off at a single stroke. The resulting mass unemployment and welfare crisis has been well documented by historians but the poetic response to this event has never been fully explored. Although nineteenth-century Lancashire poetry, particularly that written in dialect, has been studied by scholars, poetry of the Cotton Famine, including its unique aspects of multiple address and function, and fascinating reactions to the American Civil War and global economics, has received scant critical attention.

Extrapolating from initial research, we estimate that between 900 and 1100 poems of short to moderate length are in existence which relate to the famine. Through newspapers, broadsheets, and published pamphlets, poetry was an important method of social discourse, and its unique forms of address performed functions including petition, consolation, political commentary, reportage, and memorialisation. Common themes include war, slavery, hunger, poverty, prostitution, unemployment, education, charity, alcohol use, and economics.

This project will extend burgeoning recent interest in labouring-class literature by looking at the intersections between literature, regionality, and global politics. Initial research has identified relevant material in contemporary local newspapers, as well as archival material and pamphlets, broadsheets and collections. These full texts, all out of copyright, will form a fully searchable database with accompanying bibliographical information, annotation, essays, and soundfiles. The texts will be organised within the database by locality. For example, Lancastrian towns including Preston, Blackburn, and Burnley will have their own pages, and there will be pages which cover poems with miscellaneous provenance, or poems which were published in abolitionist newspapers in the United States, or poems from contemporary collections. A keyword function will provide full search capability and cross-referencing.

The database will have soundfile capability to include recitations of standard English and dialect poetry (which we estimate comprises about 10% of the total texts) and musical performances of the work where appropriate (a small minority of the material is presented as song and occasionally specifies the accompanying tune). The investigators have already attracted enthusiastic interest from performers including Jennifer Reid and the folk group Faustus. Jennifer Reid will be involved in twelve events aimed at the general public and school-age children across the Lancashire region which will promote the database through presentations, vocal and musical performance, and workshops. Faustus will be commissioned to arrange and record material associated with the project in order to promote the database. The project will also be working closely with Lancashire County Council Heritage Learning to promote the database to teachers in the region and train them how to use it. Schoolchildren will be involved in programmes to search for relevant poetry in their local libraries (many local newspaper archives are held on microfilm), and so to contribute directly to the full-text aspect of the database. This process will be managed and edited by the principal investigator.

The website accompanying the database will include contextual information and essays composed by the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be open access and directed towards the general public and scholars. The texts that will form the database will also comprise the basis for scholarly output from the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be published in academic journals.

Beneficial impact upon non-academic institutions, groups, and individuals is integral to this project. Those who will benefit will be schools, museums, libraries, local history groups, and members of the general public. A recent day-long workshop related to the project held at Chetham's Library in Manchester established links with several other non-academic institutions and individuals including The People's History Museum, The Elizabeth Gaskell House, The Portico Library (Manchester), The Working Class Movement Library (Salford), Lancashire County Council (Museums, Heritage Learning, and Libraries), Jennifer Reid (Musician, Performer), and Faustus (Traditional Music Group). All of these have agreed to be partners in the project to achieve a high level of public engagement.
The project will achieve impact in non-academic circles in the following ways:
1) The database - This project will create a sustainable, growing repository of material and a focal point for learning and teaching activities. The full-text database of Cotton Famine poetry material will be publically accessible, and the public, through managed research findings, will be able to contribute to it. These contributions could be made by individuals, historical societies, or could be the result of school and college projects which undertake searches of digitised or archived material in Lancashire towns specifically associated with the crisis. There will be close consultation with Lancashire County Council to co-ordinate educational projects across the region. The database will enrich Lancashire's perspective of its cultural heritage through the recovery of a unique poetic testimony, but broader appreciation of the history of global-local economic and cultural dependencies will also be achieved.
2) Public engagement - A series of events will acquaint young people and the general public in Lancashire with the context of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, and introduce them to the poetry that attended it. The events will consist of public talks, performances of recitation and song, and workshops. Whilst the events will have educational and entertainment value, they will also serve to publicise the poetry database in terms of future use, study, and contribution. The principal investigator is part of the University of Exeter's successful bid for inclusion in the November 2016 'Being Human' festival. The event associated with this festival will act as a template for the project events which will be held in association with some of the project partners.
3) Media outputs - The respected traditional music group Faustus, whose previous material is derived almost entirely from historically recovered archives of song and lyric (often from sources including Cecil Sharp House), have agreed to be partners in this project, and will be commissioned to record and perform arrangements of Cotton Famine lyrics sourced from the research associated with the project. In addition to providing soundtracks for audio files included in the database, these recordings could appear on the next Faustus album, and will be used in public events and distributed to the media in order to publicise the database and the wider project. Other project partners including Chetham's Library and Jennifer Reid have already been involved in a BBC Radio Four programme relating to Manchester Ballad broadsheets alongside Eliza McCarthy (see Chetham's letter of support) and pitching for similar media outputs for the current project is in the pipeline.
4) School projects - Lancashire County Council Heritage Learning are planning a series of teacher training exercises associated with the project in order to maximise engagement with the project and the database within the region. The project in principle already has the support of consulted Lancashire teachers who see the benefits of the database as a valuable tool for teaching research methods, history, and literacy.