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Ebenezer Elliott — (1781-1849)
British Poet
Ebenezer Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masborough, parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire, 17 March 1781. When seventeen he wrote his first poem, the Vernal Walk.
He engaged in many business ventures which mostly failed. He attributed much of his failure to the corn laws. At Sheffield Elliott was most active in literature and politics, as well as in commerce. The bust of Shakespeare in his counting-house, the casts of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon in his workshop typified the fact that he had other interests besides money-making.
He engaged in the reform agitation, but was disappointed at what he thought the small results of the measure. He then engaged actively in the Chartist movement, and was present as delegate from Sheffield in the great public meeting held in Palace Yard, Westminster, in 1838. When O'Connor induced the Chartists to repudiate the corn law repeal agitation, he withdrew from the Chartist movement, for his hatred of the ‘bread tax’ was all through the deepest principle in his life. He believed it had caused his father's ruin, his own losses and disappointments, both as workman and capitalist; it was ruining the country, and would cause a terrible revolution.
Thus all his efforts came to be directed to the repeal agitation. ‘Our labour, our skill, our profits, our hopes, our lives, our children's souls are bread taxed,’ he exclaims. He scarcely spoke or wrote of anything besides the corn laws. My heart, he writes,
once soft as woman's tears, is gnarled
In the gloating on the ills I cannot cure.
It was this state of mind that produced the ‘Corn-law Rhymes’ (1831), ‘Indignatio facit versus.’ They are couched in vigorous and direct language, and are full of graphic phrases. The bread tax has ‘its maw like the grave;’ the poacher ‘feeds on partridge because bread is dear;’ bad government is
The deadly will that takes
What labour ought to keep;
It is the deadly power that makes
Bread dear and labour cheap.
After his retirement from business in 1841 Elliott lived at Great Houghton, near Barnsley, where he was chiefly occupied in literary pursuits. He died there, having lived to see the hated ‘bread tax’ abolished.
Source: A Web of English History
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