3-078-059 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The late Mr. Edwin Waugh, the Lancashire poet, 1890. Engraving from a photograph by Warwick Brookes. 'The people of the cotton-manufacturing villages of East Lancashire...are a native race of strong characteristic disposition, cherishing their peculiar dialect and rustic manners, and gifted with a considerable share of humorous, imaginative, and musical faculty...Edwin Waugh...turned the local dialect to literary account with some degree of success; but he, though born at Rochdale..., was descended from a Northumberland Border family of...independent yeomen...[His] father, however, was a shoemaker...and Edwin was apprenticed to a printer. He began to write verses and essays in the Manchester Examiner and Times...About the year 1847 he ...[was appointed] assistant secretary to the Lancashire Public Schools' Association. His reputation as a poet chiefly rests on the popularity which attended the publication of a dialect song of which the words "Come whoam to thi' childer an' me" were at once the title and the burden. Other successful efforts of the same kind followed, and [in]1889 he published a volume of "Poems and Songs," showing no abatement of literary power. In 1876 his friends obtained for him a grant of £90 a year from the Civil List'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.