Walter Savage Landor once remarked patronisingly of Bristol, ‘I know of no mercantile place so literary.’ But it was precisely because the largest British metropolis outside London at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the gateway to imperial trade, that Bristol produced writers engaged in questioning both colonialism and the industrial revolution whose capital investment derived from the profits of that empire. Tumultuous Bristol was famous equally for its riots and for the self-defeating conservatism of its Corporation. West-Country Dissenters and Evangelicals campaigned against its slave trade and a vigorous peace movement opposed the war against revolutionary France until 1797. This context favoured poetry inspired by that turn, which heralded British ‘Romanticism’, away from Enlightenment narratives of the inevitable progress of reason, commerce and civilisation. Turning away also from the classical genres and styles associated with the Roman empire on which Britain modelled herself and which therefore formed the basis of male ruling-class education, the new poetry demonstrated sympathy instead with primitive or vernacular cultures which had been or were in the process of being superseded.

Thomas Chatterton steeped himself in the Middle Ages, forging for Bristol the romance of her own pre-industrial past. Hannah More was another Bristolian mimic whose anti-Paineite Village Politics (1792) by carpenter ‘Will Chip’ ventriloquised the vernacular broadsheets of pedlars. Her one-time protégée, the Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the genuine working-class article, wrote as ‘Lactilla’, challenging the assumptions of Virgilian pastoral.