Songs and Verse of the North-east Pitmen C.1780-1844

This volume contains 122 carefully-edited manuscripts and printed texts written about, for, on behalf of and by pit-village men and women, accompanied by notes, indices and a bibliography. In the introduction, the editor argues that the original pit-village texts present a challenge to conventional historical accounts. It also demonstrates how they were mediated by William Daniells, the 1840s 'Miners' Advocate' editor, who acted as a cultural and political censor of strikers' writing; and by the mid-twentieth-century Stalinist 'folklorist', A.L. Lloyd, who published altered versions to fit his concept of 'industrial folksong'.