CARNIE, Ethel Rhymes from the Factory

THE AUTHOR'S DEBUT WORK, INSCRIBED

8vo., publisher’s stitched and glued card wraps lettered with borders and decorative devices in black to both covers; title in red to upper; outer edges untrimmed; pp. [vii], viii, [i], 2-92; with full-page frontis portrait and facsimile signature; covers and outer edges of text block a little darkened, with a couple of nicks and splash marks to covers; spine chipped at ends with some closed tears; light spotting to prelims, particularly p. [i], pulling and inner hinges, but holding; previous owner’s bookplate to inside front cover; a fragile, but nonetheless very good copy.

Second edition. This copy inscribed by the author the year after publication: “From Ethel Carnie / To / Emma Littlewood / with / best wishes, /Nov 6th 1909.” The first edition was published in a run of just 500 copies, and sold out within a month. 

Ethel Carnie was a working-class writer, feminist, and socialist activist from Lancashire’s textile towns. She began working in the mills from the age of eleven, first as a reacher in the Delph Road Mill, and secondly as a winder at the St. Lawrence mill in the same town. She began to write from a young age, the present work being first published when she was just twenty one years old, and she went on to become a prolific writer, poet and journalist, publishing at least ten novels in her lifetime. She has now been credited as the first working class woman in Britain to be published. 

Rhymes from the Factory contains a selection of verses dedicated to Carnie’s friend and one of her first advocates, William Hall Burnett. The book achieved national recognition, and Carnie was subsequently approached by Robert Blatchford, proprietor of The Clarion, to work for The Woman Worker in London. Undoubtedly considered a radical, Carnie was dismissed after just six months, likely because of her increasingly outspoken editorials, but by that time her career had been launched and a second book of poems, Songs of a Factory Girl, was published in 1911. Of these new verses, two were subsequently set into song, and were dedicated to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.  

Carnie continued to speak out against factory conditions, women’s domestic service, suffrage, and, as the war loomed, conscription and fascism. She was a member of the Co-operative Society, as well as the Independent Labour Party, and during the 1920s she edited and produced The Clear Light, an anti-fascist journal. She later published a series of sonnets in the Anarchist paper Freedom, taking up the cause of Anarchists imprisoned in Soviet jails. Through all of her many campaigns, she asserted that she belonged to no political group: “I belong to the folk” she declared, “from the most undeveloped and illiterate, so confused that they are the bedrock of even reaction, to Whitman and Morris, and Marx, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.”

One of Carnie’s best-loved poems, ‘The Bookworm’, appears in the present volume: 

I own no grand baronial hall,

No pastures rich in weaving corn;

Leave unto me my love for books, 

And wealth and rank I laugh to scorn…

A scarce work, even more so inscribed thus. I have been unable to trace the recipient.

SKU: 1800280