‘Birmingham, though standing deservedly high in the arts and sciences, has done little for literature, and perhaps least of all for poetry’, a journalist observed in 1846, contrasting the city to Sheffield and Manchester, who ‘have long been as proud of their bards as of their cutlery or cotton prints’ (West Kent Guardian, 18 April 1846). These comments preceded an admiring review of the third edition of an epic poem about Sutton Park written by H.H. Horton. Nineteenth-century newspaper reviews of volumes of verse were often effusive, but the acclaim Horton received was not entirely undeserved.

Horton wrote four long poems between 1843 and 1854. The Pleasures of Temperance (1843) and The Children of the Street (1854), at twenty-three and twenty-four pages, were the shortest. At seventy and one-hundred-and-two pages, respectively, Sutton Park (1845) and Birmingham: A Poem in Two Parts (1853) were true epics. He also published a number of short poems – ‘written, most of them “off-hand”’ – in periodicals and in the final section of Sutton Park (p. iv). The Children of the Street proved to be the last poem Horton brought out; although he lived for another forty-four years, he did not publish another line. This might seem puzzling, but the explanation is evident in the prefaces and reviews of his verse. These four poems may have sold well enough to be reprinted, but perfecting them for publication brought Horton anxiety and their composition took up time he did not really have.

Horton is now largely a forgotten poet. His poem about temperance is a curiosity – but probably still unread – among social historians and his poem about the poor children is lost, appearing only in the catalogue of Birmingham Library. In being unremembered, Horton joins the ranks of the many other nineteenth-century poets who churned out verse for local newspapers or published volumes with the aid of subscriptions. The difference with Horton is that some of his verse does not entirely deserve to be consigned to oblivion. This chapter will recover Horton’s story, setting centre stage the poetic work of his young adulthood.

Harry Howells Horton was born in Birmingham on 8 June 1811, the third of five children.¹ His father, Joseph Horton, who had married Maria Booth six years earlier, was a skilled working man. An engraver, he had built a house for his family, with an adjoining workshop, in Barford Street. It was, however, at Holy Trinity in Sutton Coldfield that Horton was baptised and lines in his poem about Sutton Park inform us that he spent part of his childhood in the town. His father had aspirations for his son and had acquired enough money to send him for two years to King Edward’s School, a Georgian building located in New Street:

’Twas in its classic courts my boyhood strayed,

There conned my Latin, or the truant played:

I loved my reverend tutor’s easy sway,

Save when his anger roused us to obey. (Birmingham, p. 62)

The ‘reverend tutor’ was the second master, the Revd Rann Kennedy, whom Horton sought to emulate. While other masters Horton deemed in ‘utter want of knowledge’, Kennedy was a noted Classics scholar, preacher and poet (Birmingham, p. 225). He was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and an acquaintance of William Wordsworth and Washington Irving, who described him as ‘a most eccentric character […] both in my admiration and my amusement’ (quoted in Thomas Winter Hutton, 1952, p. 101). Reading Kennedy’s verse Horton concluded that he was ‘a poet of no mean pretensions’ (Birmingham, p. 62n).² Horton and his siblings had attended St Bartholomew’s Chapel in Digbeth where ‘Forced by parental rule to note the text, | Though ever by the sermon more perplexed’ (Birmingham, p. 36). He was much more comfortable at Carr’s Lane Independent Chapel where, from the Birmingham nonconformist clergyman and antislavery campaigner John Angell James (1785–1859), ‘I first was taught to know | That life is vanity, the world a show’ (Birmingham, p. 39), and at St Paul’s Church listening to the Kennedy’s sermons, which were ‘entirely free from bigotry and intolerance’ (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 6 January 1851). A travelling salesman seeking orders for paper, Horton is perhaps best described as being lower-middle class. It was a precarious living, however, and Horton often described himself as poor. Married to Sarah Rathbone in 1837 and the father of two children, he addressed a poem on his situation to his son:

But the child of the poor, alas! must endure

The evils that Poverty brings […]

And thus do I feel, a doubt o’er me steal,

As I think what the future may be,

When I look at the strife of my own chequer’d life,

My heart beats more anxious for thee. (‘To My Infant Child’, Sutton Park, pp. 83, 84)

Throughout his life Horton had a very strong interest in the condition of working people, advocating political reform as well as practical self-improvement. When he read the arguments of Robert Owen that wholesale change to society was needed, he was impressed. There was much that made sense to Horton in Owen’s statements about the private accumulation of wealth, the flaws of the Church of England, and a national system of education. Securing the vote was not enough, men and women had to change – starting with embracing temperance – and there was a need for an entirely new sort of society.

Owen visited Birmingham in November 1832 to deliver lectures and address meetings in support of his proposal for ‘equitable labour exchanges’, which, by enabling working people to exchange commodities they had produced, would ‘relieve the industrious producers of wealth from the pecuniary difficulties against which they have been so long struggling’ (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 26 November 1832).³ Leading figures in the Birmingham reform movement, such as Thomas Attwood and George Muntz, put in appearances and the meetings were very crowded. One at Beardsworth’s Repository, where horse auctions were normally held, attracted 8,000 people. It is difficult to believe that Horton would have missed such an exciting opportunity to hear Owen.

In March 1833, a labour exchange was established in Union Street, its lunchtime and evening opening hours convenient to working men. The exchange closed a year later, but Owenite activity continued in Birmingham (Barnsby, pp. 59–60). At the shop in Steelhouse Lane of newsagent and printer James Guest, Horton was able to find as much Owenite literature as he wanted to read. The influence of Owen’s ideas is evident in the repeated condemnation of private accumulation in Horton’s verse.

Reading Owen’s writings shaped Horton’s own religious beliefs. After Owen’s death Horton wrote that it was ‘not the church’ but he ‘that first showed the wisdom and practicability of those divine lessons of charity that Christ came to teach. He did not profess, but practised christian benevolence’ (Birmingham, p. 283). Horton was very critical of the Church of England which he believed knew nothing about the lives of the poor – its clergymen living in great comfort – and indeed went out of its way to exclude them. The arrival of the nonconformist preacher George Dawson in Birmingham in 1844 caused quite a stir and Horton was certainly caught up in it. At the Church of the Saviour, brightly decorated and with a choir of the highest standard, Dawson welcomed anyone, regardless of their religious attachments, and invited them to think freely (Reekes and Roberts, 2021). Horton celebrated this new way of practising religion:

His teaching was from nature not from lore –

He touched a chord which none had touched before.

The people pressed, his searching words to hear;

Fluent, yet simple – earnest, yet severe.

Conversions sprang around on every side. (Birmingham, p. 40)

Curiosity took Horton to the Church of the Saviour, and he got to know Dawson well. Both venerated Shakespeare, and in November 1846 Horton gave a lecture on him to a well-attended meeting of members of the congregation. He believed that better knowledge of Shakespeare was necessary in the town. ‘I know men’, he observed, who ‘hardly know whether Shakspeare wrote Hamlet, or Hamlet Shakspeare’ (Birmingham, p. 252). At his lecture Horton reviewed a number of Shakespeare’s characters, finding good even in such unsavoury characters as Shylock (‘as much sinned against as sinning’) and Hamlet whose ‘language was often expressive of nobleness of sentiment’.⁴ In conclusion Horton declared that Shakespeare had elevated the aspirations of the human race and was the greatest man who ‘had ever lived in the tide of times’ (Birmingham Journal, 21 November 1846). Admirers of Shakespeare in Birmingham were in good company: one of Horton’s closest friends, Humphrey Jefferies, a button manufacturer, regularly invited him to his depictions on stage of characters from the plays. After Dawson’s sudden death in November 1876 Horton delivered a ‘very effective and interesting’ memorial lecture in Newcastle-under-Lyme, even if there was ‘but a moderate attendance’ (Staffordshire Sentinel, 23 December 1876).

As a young man Horton yearned to be a poet. His infatuation with his Sunday School teacher was expressed in verse, but that poem and whatever else he wrote during those years has not survived (see Birmingham, pp. 36, 220).⁵ By the mid-1840s, however, he had become very adept as a poet and part of a regional network. The work of the artisan poets John Critchley Prince (1808–66) and William Thom (1788–1848) inspired poetic replies from Horton. He was enthralled by a borrowed copy of Prince’s best-known volume, Hours with the Muses (1841), ‘for my soul hath fed | On its rich treasures with an eager eye’ (‘To the Rev. Hugh Hutton’, Sutton Park, p. 102)⁶ and the two men established friendly relations. Horton supported a vote of thanks when Prince read extracts from his verse at a meeting to mark the anniversary of the People’s Library in West Bromwich in April 1847. When the fourth edition of Sutton Park was published in 1850, it included a selection of Prince’s poems. The short poems that Horton wrote at this time were mainly concerned with the contrast between nature and the ‘moral blot’ (Sutton Park, p. 82) that was man, the grandeur of Old Yardley Church and Aston Hall and, most especially, his perpetual concern, poverty.

Horton wanted to use his talents in aid of a cause that was important to him, but he also had to make a living as a travelling salesman and had family responsibilities, with his wife Sarah Rathbone expecting their first child as he was creating his first long poem. As with all writers of this kind, Horton had to compose The Pleasures of Temperance (1843) in between attending to the pressing concerns of life. With his poem finally finished, he turned to John W. Showell, a bookseller and printer of Upper Temple Street, Birmingham. Showell published almanacks, pocket books for businessmen, and account books for housekeepers, but also, on behalf of sects and societies, religious, teetotal and peace tracts. It is likely that Horton knew Showell through these causes, and that Horton was assisted in meeting the printing costs of his poem by their local supporters. The poem was not intended only for local consumption. Horton also sent his manuscript to G. and J. Dyer of Paternoster Row in London, who specialised in religious publications. Copies of the poem even found their way to America.

Horton had felt great shame when he had succumbed to inebriation, and decided to take the teetotal pledge. He became a member of the local temperance society, founded in 1830, and subsequently was attracted to the Independent Order of Rechabites, which had been formed in Salford in 1835. The Rechabites had taken their name from an Old Testament figure, who had urged his tribe to abstain from alcohol. Members paid a fee of 1s 1d, were issued with a membership card and medal (made in Birmingham), and were able to join savings and insurance schemes. The Rechabites spread their message through a periodical called The Crystal Fount & Rechabite Recorder. Branches – known as ‘tents’ – were established across the country, including in Birmingham.

The Birmingham ‘tent’ was part of a wider temperance movement in the town, in which Joseph Sturge, John Cadbury and the Revd Thomas Swan were the leading figures. At a procession of temperance campaigners through Birmingham in April 1840, the Rechabites, Horton amongst them, dressed in plaid and carried a bundle of barley with a placard attached to it declaring ‘Better to eat it than to drink it’ (Birmingham Journal, 25 April 1840). One of the great public moments of these years that Horton would long remember was the visit to Birmingham of the Irish Catholic priest and celebrated temperance campaigner Theobald Matthew – known as Father Matthew – in September 1843. On his arrival Matthew ate his breakfast at the Royal Hotel with the mayor Thomas Weston, Joseph Sturge and other leading local figures and delivered a speech. Afterwards at Smithfield Market he administered the teetotal pledge to an estimated 1,500 men and women, many of whom knelt in front of him. Horton was overwhelmed by it all. The Pleasures of Temperance was inspired by the visit and dedicated, with permission, to Matthew.

In addition to Shakespeare, Horton had also read much of the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth. It appeared to him that the clarity offered by blank verse was the most effective means of communicating the temperance message. His poem had to be understood by the working men for whom it was written. The greater part of the poem is devoted to the miseries the drunkard inflicts on himself and his family. Drunkenness, Horton asserts, leads to personal ruin, both economic and moral, crime, violence and even disease:

deluded man,

To think thy happiness is reason’s loss,

And in the fumes of liquor to forget

At once thy duty, interest, and end. (The Pleasures of Temperance, p. 16)

Horton has no doubt that the blame for widespread inebriety lay with the rulers themselves, the clergy, magistrates and judges:

our rich Clergy dignify the sin,

And make that pass as blameless, which entails

More woe by their example, than their lives

Employ’d in prayer and preaching can undo […]

The Squire (whose acts seem wisdom to the Clown)

Has knowledge which may guard him from extremes […]

But the poor Peasant cannot check desire:

Again, again, he drains the poisonous cup […]

He grows more bold and quarrelsome. At last,

By passion mov’d, he strikes the man he loved –

They fight – the wife entreats – he still persists

And in the struggle kills his drunken friend!

The next day he is tried – by whom? – the Squire:

The very man who taught him first to err. (Pleasures of Temperance, pp. 8, 9)

In contrast to this misery Horton offers a portrait of a sober man who drinks water, ‘the chrystal friend of smiling Health’; who ‘rises early with the warbling lark’; who is able ‘to toil with ease’; and who returns to ‘his peaceful home, | Where loving smiles await him’ (pp. 17, 18). Temperance, Horton informs his readers, is the ‘Best of all Reforms – Reform of Self’ (p. 5) and would spur the political reforms that working men seek:

Thus might our land be made the seat of bliss

In spite of governments, or wicked laws,

Which soon would be amended, – when men saw

Their rights through sober Reason’s hallow’d light:

When Temperance rules us, we shall rule our foes;

Till then we cannot even rule ourselves. (p. 19)

Parts of Sutton Park were written before Horton set about composing his poem about temperance. Henry Kirke White’s long poem ‘Clifton Grove’ had had a profound effect on him and the similarity between it and his own poem is clear. In fact, it would not be a stretch to describe Horton’s poem as a tribute to White’s. Though Horton was captivated by this poem, he was, when he eventually visited the place that had inspired it, very disappointed. Sutton Park, he believed, was a much better subject for a descriptive poem. Horton’s poem was completed in autumn 1844 after he re-visited ‘the favourite resort of […] boyhood’ (Sutton Park, preface to first edition, 1844). The poem was published in Birmingham by the bookseller and printer John Wilson of Birmingham and by Darton & Clarke of London in October 1844 at a cost 3s 6d. The first edition soon sold out, including heartening sales outside the local area. A second edition was published in January 1845, with only minor amendments, and a third edition in February 1845, when Horton revised and extended the text and added a number of his own attractive engravings. Playing his part in the fraternity of poets, in the preface to the third edition he mentioned Georgina Bennett, who also lived in Birmingham and whose work possessed ‘high poetical merit’ (Sutton Park, preface to third edition, 1846, [p. iii]).⁷ Subscribers undertook to purchase copies of all three editions – in fact 197 copies were sold in this way, including to Attwood (10) and Dawson (1).

Horton began his poem by remembering the childhood years he spent in Sutton Coldfield. He recalls ‘the low cot’ where he lived, his deceased schoolmaster Jervis Booth who ‘requires no praise-ensculptured stone’, and his playmates in Sutton Park who ‘Though lost in sight, I hear their voices still’ (pp. 18–19). Soon, however, he laments ‘man’s avarice’ when he remembers the felling of trees and the poverty of the people who ‘feel a brief oblivion of their woes’ in Sutton Park but are driven to poaching which he is reluctant to call a crime (pp. 16, 20). Many lines then follow about the poverty of the working man:

What follows? – crime, the workhouse, or still worse

To starve, when plenty forms the bitter curse –

When idle wealth in vast profusion lies […]

No law his equal interests to declare,

Or give him in his country’s rights a share. (pp. 33, 35)

Horton concludes the first part of his poem by wishing to ‘Forget the vulgar cares of busy life, | Its noise – its sorrows – and its endless strife’ (p. 42) and be ‘Away from man, from fashion, and from pride’ (p. 23).

The second part of the poem returns to Horton’s well-established themes of poverty and avarice. He deplores the enclosure of land which brought to an end the traditional rights of the poor man:

From the strong grasp of power; the land’s enclosed

On which his ancestors in peace reposed;

Year after year the envious fences rise,

And shut the low-roofed cottage from our eyes;

The poet, kindling, with indignant strain

Laments the loss, – but, ah, laments in vain. (pp. 62–3)

Horton anticipates his at times sorrowful poem about Birmingham, where ‘Science lights her sons to Mammon’s shrine […] How many a tale of woe may there be told – | How many a struggle for the bauble – gold!’ (p. 60).

The poem concludes with Horton’s sadness at his own inability to change these things:

The poet scorns the ignoble race for gain,

And hence his life is marked by want and pain;

He seeks in solitude to vent his grief,

The Muse his sole companion and relief. (p. 65)⁸

Sutton Park does hymn the beauties of that place, but, like Horton’s other verse, it was a vehicle for his social concerns. The poem was welcomed in local newspapers, but the well-known journalist Alexander Somerville had no time for it at all. Horton found himself accused of ‘unsound sentiment […] cant about “good old times” […] cant less tolerable still […] of “gold” and “gain” being of the cold material world […] yet Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It were written for gain and by a man who […] knew how to take care of gold when he got it’ (Manchester Times, 28 November 1846).

Poetry, Horton knew, gave vent to his feelings but changed nothing. In summer 1849 he promoted a scheme to help the poor. He set out, in a letter to local newspapers, a plan to build small houses for older people in danger of entering the workhouse. He proposed a subscription fund of at least one penny a week which, as soon as it reached £200, would enable four cottages to be built. He was sure the money would be raised to build hundreds more. His investigations had led him to conclude that the land could be obtained without charge and he indicated that he had already had pledges of support from people with money for the building fund. The residents of these little houses would be selected by the subscribers – with one vote each regardless of the size of their contribution – and would pay a very modest rent. A meeting was called at Corbett’s Temperance Hotel and Horton became secretary of a committee which would ‘speedily report on the subject’ (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 25 June 1849). Alas for Horton, the committee collapsed, the report was never written and the cottages were never built. It was time to write another poem.

That poem would take as its subject the town of his birth. Birmingham was conceived as a companion poem to Sutton Park, the intent being to contrast a busy, thriving industrial town with the tranquillity and beauty of a landscape with little interference from man. It was written in the tradition of couplet verse satire, which Horton was all too familiar with from the cheap reprints of such eighteenth-century writers as Pope – whose verse is quoted in the poem – John Gay and ‘Peter Pindar’ that circulated in Birmingham. The poem appeared in three editions, each in turn revised. The second edition added an appendix of no less than 188 pages, almost twice the length of the poem itself. Horton enjoyed antiquarian research and added to this personal knowledge – gleaned from, in the case of his fascinating account of the trades of Birmingham, visits to the factories when he was seeking orders for paper. The appendix also gave him the opportunity to elaborate on what he regarded as urgent questions – such as implementing ‘a radical change in our present unwise system of education’ or shutting down gin palaces such as ‘that gorgeous den of iniquity called the Crystal Palace, in Edgbaston Street, crowded every night, Sundays not excepted’ (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 25 June 1849).

The first part of the poem offers a tour of Birmingham, encompassing its trades, its churches and aspects of its history. Horton had hardly begun telling of the ‘wonders’ of ‘the great town’ noted ‘for its hatred of tyranny and oppression’, before its defects showed through:

there are evils lurking ’neath its pride,

Which all its prosperous commerce fails to hide:

That social maladies are but o’erlaid

By the thin glare and bustle of our trade. (Birmingham. p. 15)

He deplores the manufacture of arms but sees in pen nibs ‘a new staple, as sweet knowledge spreads, | Displacing bullets for the people’s heads’ (p. 22: see Roberts, 2016, pp. 5–20). He is shocked by the manufacturers ‘Who, pressing onward in the race for gain, | Hear not the plaints around of human pain’ (p. 46). And he has nothing but contempt when ‘the rich clergy may look on and smile; | That titled sin in lazy wealth should thrive, | While honest worth scarce keeps itself alive’ (p. 46). Horton wants men to become ‘enlightened Christians, instead of mere church-goers’ (p. 31n) who

By uttering certain phrases once a week,

As if by that we cancelled every sin,

Committed oft the long six days within.

Why lay a claim to faith we do not feel?

Why practice wrongs which sermons may not heal? (p. 42)

Horton’s longing for material as well as moral improvement was sincere and insistent. He took much satisfaction from the successful campaign in Birmingham against church rates. Here was proof that the people could bring about reform:

the people, by the fraud enraged,

Against their pious foes at last engaged.

Honour’d for ever be the names of those

Who, strong in truth, against the Church arose,

And, with unflinching courage, dared withstand

Her ever grasping and rapacious hand.

Despite her canon laws, and eke the state,

They called that plunder which she called a rate. (p. 31)

In the second part of the poem, Horton writes with great pride about another triumph of the Birmingham reformers – the demonstration of 200,000 people in support of parliamentary reform that he attended on Newhall Hill in May 1832. He was certain that it was Thomas Attwood – ‘the people’s god’ (p. 73) – and the Birmingham Political Union ‘which gained the Reform Bill’ (p. xiii):

Oh, what a glorious sight! When far around

The countless streamers waved, and not a sound

(Save when the speaker some new burst awoke)

From that vast sea of human beings broke.

It was a day for England – her big heart

Did beat upon that spot, and every part

Of her far realm its sympathy had proved,

By pausing as we paused, and moving as we moved. (p. 73)

Lines celebrating these successes for reform were deliberately interposed throughout the poem by Horton to remind readers that the evils he described – poverty, ignorance, inebriety – could be eliminated by determined, principled men. Birmingham, he believed, was the place to lead change. Remembering the enormous demonstration he attended when the Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth arrived in Birmingham in November 1851, he wrote ‘My native town, I never loved thee more […] Oh! ’twas a beauteous sight’ (pp. 75–6).

Growing disillusionment with the members of the town council was also evident in Horton’s verse. He provides a portrait of one of these greedy, talentless men who

cons his books and sighs for more;

Sits in the Council, near the civic chair,

And, though an Alderman, he would be Mayor:

Soon to the throne of honour he attains,

For fortune’s smiles make up for lack of brains. (pp. 55–6)

This ceaseless pursuit of position and wealth appalled Horton:

Now comes the question – let us try it well –

Was man created but to buy and sell? […]

Are all his faculties so perfect made

To be absorbed within a sea of trade? (p. 58)

There are heartfelt passages in the poem about the lives of the ‘slaves of toil’ who are employed ‘In shops whose heated airs oppress the mind’ (p. 57). Horton draws particular attention to the cruelty inflicted on children ‘who wake to slavery’ (p. 52) and face ‘A far worse penalty than whips and chains, […] What is it? but to wield a deadlier rod’ (p. 53). ‘I have heard of many dreadful things enacted, I am sorry to say, by the masters towards some of the girls employed in our manufactories’, he wrote in an indignant note,

I am informed […] that one large employer dismisses them, without any notice, on the most trivial grounds. He must be a vulgar, tyrannical fellow and, if I find it to be true I shall not scruple, though he be as rich as Croesus, to brand his name as it deserves. (pp. 53n–54n)

Much like his opening discussion of its ‘wonders’, Horton devotes passages to describing some of the main buildings of Birmingham, but, in spite of his evident civic pride, Birmingham is a poem fired principally by anger at poverty, injustice, cruelty and greed.

During these years Horton lived with his wife and son in a series of lodgings in Handsworth and Hockley. In 1847 his wife died, shortly after the birth of a daughter; the child was looked after by her great-uncle’s family as Horton continued to seek to make a living in different ways – selling paper locally, dealing in pictures and teaching drawing. He found picture-dealing an especially underhand business. Unable to pay his rent, he found himself, in April 1851, facing a petition for insolvency.

It is not clear how Horton cleared his debts, but he certainly recognised that it was time for a new life. When he remarried in May 1852 (by Dawson at the Church of the Saviour), he was able to re-establish his family. He relocated to Aston with his wife, her son and his two children, and entered Queen’s College in Paradise Street to study theology. By 1857 he had taken over from Henry Bourne as schoolmaster at the long-established Ashted Classical and Commercial School, where, in an environment which rejected corporal punishment, boys were prepared for King Edwards and Queen’s College. To promote the school Horton produced an engraving.

At the end of 1853 Horton wrote the last poem he was ever to publish. He had been reading to his son and daughter Thomas Miller’s ‘Babes in the Wood’ (1850) and wished to point out to them that children suffered as much in towns as in the countryside. A report on the treatment of prisoners in the borough gaol was also on his mind and it was this that prompted him to make his lines public. The report, which appeared in July 1853, had revealed that prisoners had been deprived of sleep and exercise, drenched in water, fed bread and water for six days out of seven and compelled to wear the straightjacket. Horton’s poetic protest was brought out in Birmingham by H. Winnall, a bookseller who also offered a medicine for cholera, and in London by Robert Hardwicke, a bookseller and printer in Lincoln’s Inn. The poem ran into three editions, and the profits were donated to ragged and industrial schools in the town.

The Children of the Street: A Tale of Birmingham Life features an orphaned brother and sister, Johnny and Ellen, who are taken in by a kind-hearted widow. Johnny is taken on by a master ‘tyrannous and rude’ and soon ‘runs the streets and lanes’ before deciding to ‘take a little share | Of those who have too much’ (pp. 11–12). Sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour, he is subjected to the punishments set out in the report. With the widow dead, Ellen goes to work in a factory and is fundamentally changed by the conditions there – a development that reveals the influence that Owen’s philosophy had had on Horton. Like its predecessors, this poem is fused with contemporary concerns, paying no heed to distinctions between art and moral responsibility.

Horton now turned his back on poetry. He found what he regarded as a better way to help the poor – as well as to escape the commercial world he so detested. Ordained as an Anglican clergyman in 1859, he spent the rest of his life as a curate and a vicar in Birmingham and Staffordshire. During these years he mixed among working people.

In 1866 Horton acquired a doctorate from the University of Rostock. It was not uncommon for men who had made something of themselves in the world of literature or school teaching, but lacked formal recognition, to be awarded such degrees at this time. The University of Rostock – and other German universities – placed advertisements in British newspapers inviting men who wanted to show the world their intellectual standing to get in touch with their agent. Horton put forward a number of testimonials and a weighty volume of prayers and selections from the Bible that he had edited under the title of The Book of Family Worship (1862) and a scientific paper that reflected a new area of study for him. He also paid fees to the agent and to his examiners at Rostock. Horton’s doctorate cost him about twelve guineas.

And so this life-long critic of the Anglican Church spent his last decades as an Anglican clergyman. Horton, however, had not left behind the burning passion that had inspired him as a radical poet – he remained the foe of poverty until the end of his life. Presenting himself as a candidate for the chaplaincy of St John’s in Deritend, Birmingham, in June 1870, he made this very clear:

Having always felt a deep interest in the welfare of the working classes, if any candidate had a claim to their consideration, it was himself who had grown grey almost in their service […] He had nothing to say against Mr Badger personally, but insomuch as the constituency of those hamlets consisted chiefly of working men, he considered that his own claim to the chaplaincy ought to be held higher than that of any other candidate, seeing that he had always moved with the working classes and should always be disposed to warmly sympathize with them in all their objects. (Birmingham Daily Post, 7 June 1870)⁹