Content area
Full text
Abstract: The primary historical context for interpretations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" (1843) has long been the 1842-43 Children's Employment Commission reports. Examining the poem in light of Barrett Browning's prior attempt to address working-class suffering in "O pardon dear lady" (1842) offers new evidence for her engagement with the reports. It also, however, underscores the effects of the anti-Corn Law movement and of what Barrett Browning termed "agriculturalevil" on her "factory-evil" poem. An unfinished ballad in the voice of a starving rural child, "O pardon" exhibits multiple features connecting it to Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes (1830-31), some of which appear also in "The Cry of the Children." The first part of this essay considers literary engagement with the anti-Corn Law movement initiated by Elliott, his connections with Barrett Browning, and her intensifying interest in antiCorn Law politics and in Chartism in 1842. The second part analyzes images, echoes, and rhetorical strategies connecting "O pardon" to "The Cry of the Children" and both to Corn Law Rhymes. It also explores similarities between the poems and witness narratives as these are conceptualized in contemporary life-writing and human rights studies.
In 1841, the poet Richard Hengist Horne was in Wolverhampton working for the Children's Employment Commission (CEC), whose 1842-43 reports on child laborers in mines and manufacturing would galvanize legislative reform. After gathering "statements of 123 witnesses from all classes and grades of life, of both sexes and all ages," including "96 . . . children and young persons," Horne wrote "To Her Majesty's Commissioners" on 25 May, submitting his "evidence" on "Iron Trades and Other Manufactures" in Wolverhampton and South Staffordshire (Horne Q1).1 The letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (then Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) at the time reveal no awareness of the conditions Horne was investigating. On 27 March, she mentions him writing with "millions of pots & pans for a background" and sending "his picture 'showing' how he looks when fresh-black from the pits," then deplores the "national dishonor" of "high spirits" doing "such work!" (Kelley et al. 5: 31). On 30 May, after describing to Mary Russell Mitford her collaboration with Horne on a "Lyrical Drama," she laments, "not a line" is written and "he has gone down to...