Corn Law Rhymes. The Ranter,

£5,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very Rare. OCLC records only two copies of this first edition: one at the University of London in the Goldsmiths’-Kress library of economic literature and the other at Brigham Young University (seemingly bound with a later edition of Elliott’s poems). Two further editions appeared the following year (printed and published in London) which added more poems before a collected works which was published in 1833. This very rare first printing of Elliott’s important poem was known to Jackson and included in his Bibliography of Romantic Poetry (online via the University of Toronto) but he was unable to examine a copy due to the rarity. The very rare first appearance of the radical poem “The Ranter” by the so-called Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, who wrote powerful, popular and celebrated verse which attacked the ‘bread tax’, the exploitation of child and adult labour, the punitively low wages of the working classes, and the suppression of free trade. This remarkably rare little publication was printed (and most likely distributed by hand) in Sheffield, the heartland of the poor and oppressed industrial north of England that Elliott depicted in verse. Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) was born in Rotheram in Yorkshire to a politically radical iron-founder father, the trade that Elliott himself would later take up when he joined his father’s failing business as a young man. Elliott received a large amount of money when he married in 1805 but disastrously invested this in his father’s c

• Year: 1830
• Printing: first

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