The Pitman Poet
Joseph Skipsey taught himself to read and write by candlelight, hundreds of feet below ground in a Northumberland pit.
1832-1903
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Joseph Skipsey taught himself to read and write by candlelight, hundreds of feet below ground in a Northumberland pit.
1832-1903
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) taught himself to read and write down a Northumberland pit when he was just seven. He subsequently became a nationally-recognised poet, praised by Wilde and Tennyson, but it was an art born of hardship and personal tragedy.
AT the age of seven, Joseph Skipsey started work in his hometown colliery at Percy Main in Northumberland. He worked six to twelve hours a day – in winter, he saw the sun only on a Sunday — operating the trapdoor through which the wagons passed, and his education was limited to the alphabet.
But he scraped together a collection of advertisements and newspapers, and taught himself to write in chalk on the trapdoor by candlelight. He added a Bible, learning by heart the passages he liked best, and then a grammar-book, and a copy of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, and soon was writing his own verses.
In 1852, he walked to London looking for a job on the railways, but quickly returned north to the collieries as a hewer, where his ‘Poems in Morpeth’, published in 1859, brought him to public attention, first in Gateshead, then nationally. Oscar Wilde admired Joseph’s ‘Carols from the Coalfields’; Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised the ‘freshness’ of his shorter verses.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How did Skipsey manage to learn to write, despite having neither pen nor paper?
He used chalk on a wooden trapdoor.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Skipsey’s ‘Book of Lyrics’ was published in 1878. Dante Gabriel Rossetti read it. He invited Skipsey to London.