In the 1860s global politics had a profound effect on a local economy when, during the American Civil War, the Union blockaded cotton exports from the Confederacy, and the main raw material of much of Lancashire's industry was cut off at a single stroke. The resulting mass unemployment and welfare crisis has been well documented by historians but the poetic response to this event has never been fully explored. Although nineteenth-century Lancashire poetry, particularly that written in dialect, has been studied by scholars, poetry of the Cotton Famine, including its unique aspects of multiple address and function, and fascinating reactions to the American Civil War and global economics, has received scant critical attention. Extrapolating from initial research, we estimate that between 900 and 1100 poems of short to moderate length are in existence which relate to the famine. Through newspapers, broadsheets, and published pamphlets, poetry was an important method of social discourse, and its unique forms of address performed functions including petition, consolation, political commentary, reportage, and memorialisation. Common themes include war, slavery, hunger, poverty, prostitution, unemployment, education, charity, alcohol use, and economics. This project will extend burgeoning recent interest in labouring-class literature by looking at the intersections between literature, regionality, and global politics. Initial research has identified relevant material in contemporary local newspapers, as well as archival material and pamphlets, broadsheets and collections. These full texts, all out of copyright, will form a fully searchable database with accompanying bibliographical information, annotation, essays, and soundfiles. The texts will be organised within the database by locality. For example, Lancastrian towns including Preston, Blackburn, and Burnley will have their own pages, and there will be pages which cover poems with miscellaneous provenance, or poems which were published in abolitionist newspapers in the United States, or poems from contemporary collections. A keyword function will provide full search capability and cross-referencing. The database will have soundfile capability to include recitations of standard English and dialect poetry (which we estimate comprises about 10% of the total texts) and musical performances of the work where appropriate (a small minority of the material is presented as song and occasionally specifies the accompanying tune). The investigators have already attracted enthusiastic interest from performers including Jennifer Reid and the folk group Faustus. Jennifer Reid will be involved in twelve events aimed at the general public and school-age children across the Lancashire region which will promote the database through presentations, vocal and musical performance, and workshops. Faustus will be commissioned to arrange and record material associated with the project in order to promote the database. The project will also be working closely with Lancashire County Council Heritage Learning to promote the database to teachers in the region and train them how to use it. Schoolchildren will be involved in programmes to search for relevant poetry in their local libraries (many local newspaper archives are held on microfilm), and so to contribute directly to the full-text aspect of the database. This process will be managed and edited by the principal investigator. The website accompanying the database will include contextual information and essays composed by the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be open access and directed towards the general public and scholars. The texts that will form the database will also comprise the basis for scholarly output from the principal investigator, co-investigator, and postdoctoral researcher which will be published in academic journals.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.