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Whom the Gods love die young, and thus are they insured of everlasting youth. The idea is full of beauty were it not that this weary old world so much needs those on whom the Gods have bestowed their choicest gifts."1 So wrote Keir Hardie, Britain's first Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament, in his preface to Machine-Room Chants, a volume of posthumously published poetry written by Tom Maguire and printed by the Labour Leader in April 1895. Maguire, a workingclass Leeds socialist, poet, journalist, and labor organizer, died on 9 March 1895 at the age of twenty-nine. In his short life he contributed significantly to the rise of socialism in late nineteenth-century Britain, and his contributions were both literary and organizational.
While still in his early twenties, Maguire was a leader in instigating the tide of New Unionism- the effort to broaden the scope of organized labor to include unskilled and semi-skilled workers- that swept Leeds in a number of important strikes from 1889 to '90, including strikes by dyers, gas workers, tailoresses, builders' laborers, and bricklayers. From 1885 to 1895 he also published a great deal of poetry, songs, fiction, and journalism in radical papers such as Commonweal, the Labour Leader, and the Yorkshire Factory Times, as well as his own socialist paper, the Labour Champion. Interestingly, many of his poems feature working-class women speakers, reflecting his experience in organizing Leeds tailoresses, and his journalistic writing is also notable for its play in voice, persona, and perspective. But aside from Machine-Room Chants and another posthumous volume (Tom Maguire, A Remembrance, published by the Manchester Labour Press in 1895), Maguire's work exists almost exclusively in the archives of the radical press. Even these two volumes- Tom Maguire and Machine-Room Chants - reprint verse and prose that originally appeared in socialist newspapers.2 In publishing their work, nineteenth-century working-class writers were especially likely to be limited to periodical venues; because volume publication has mainly been the privilege of the wealthy or well connected, critics interested in class critique have learned to pay heed to newspapers and magazines, revaluing the Victorian periodical as a poetic medium.3 As is the case with so many working-class writers, to rediscover and appreciate Maguire's career we must rediscover and appreciate the...