Rare Thomas Chesworth Burslem Potter 1839-1880 Poems published by Atelier Productions 1998

Thomas Chesworth Burslem Potter 1839-1880 Poems

During the 1870s, whilst he was living in Burslem and working as a flat presser in a local pottery, Thomas Chesworth published several poems in the Potteries Examiner, a local weekly paper devoted to the interests of Labour. These poems, together with others, were written out in a green-covered notebook preserved by the family after his death.

The collection includes exhortations to courage and persistence in the struggle to promote the brotherhood of man, occasional pieces commemorating a marriage, a death and other events in the local community, encomia on the role of Woman, a few poems which (though perhaps of a more narrowly literary origin) seem to record moments of personal grief, and two longer narrative poems demonstrating a palpable sense of fun in the rendering of local idiom.

The Wesleyan Methodist virtues of patience,  frugality, sobriety and persistence, faith in progress and self help; communal memories of deprivation and squalor; a tradition of recitation, and an abiding awareness; amidst the smoke and slag heaps and drab terraces, of the countryside lying around and between the six small towns immortalised by Arnold Bennett as five only : all these aspects of the history of the Potteries in the latter part of the nineteenth century are reflected here.

Pages 63

Illustrated with Pottery images

Published by Atelier Productions 1998