Robert Poole was the speaker at our October meeting. He delivered a fascinating lecture about the radical writer and reformer, Samuel Bamford (1788-1872), best known for his prominent role in the 1819 Peterloo demonstration in Manchester and his memoirs Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days. He is named in Mary Barton where his poem ‘God Help the Poor’ is reproduced, which led to Elizabeth visiting his home to take him a signed copy of Tennyson’s poetry – an encounter vividly described in one of her letters. Bamford also worked with William Gaskell and Manchester Lit and Phil on the first Lancashire dialect dictionary – the dialect in Mary Barton is essentially Bamford’s. The lives of these Manchester writers are linked in other ways, through Dickens, the Carlyles, and the Preston lockout (the background to North and South). But while they shared many sentiments, the life of a working-class writer faced far more obstacles than that of Elizabeth Gaskell.

Robert Poole is a historian of 18th and 19th century Britain. He is the author of Peterloo: the English Uprising, co-author of the graphic novel Peterloo, and consultant historian to the 2019 Peterloo bicentenary commemoration in Manchester. He also writes on the cultural history of the space age, and is author of Earthrise: how man first saw the Earth. He has written, lectured and broadcast internationally and is Emeritus Professor at the School of Psychology and Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Your ticket will give you access to the online recording, which we’ll keep online until Friday October 31st 2025.

Please don’t share the access: as a charity, the Gaskell Society relies on its income from events.

Tickets are £5 for members, £6 for non-members: use the ‘book now’ link below.