A Voice From the Factories

Caroline Norton - granddaughter of R. B. Sheridan, editor, contributor to literary annuals, friend of Lord Melbourne - was one of the most successful literary women of her day, a poet whose work has been strangely neglected. An unhappy marriage led to separation from her children, her anguish flowing into this anonymously-published testament to the abuse of child-labour. Poised between Wordsworth's appalled portrayal in the Excursion of the factory child, lungs filled with cotton fibres, and the more famous protests of the Victorian novel, the poem has brevity, political relevance, and force.