{"product_id":"carnie-ethel-rhymes-from-the-factory","title":"CARNIE, Ethel Rhymes from the Factory","description":"\u003ch3 style=\"font-variant: small-caps\"\u003eTHE AUTHOR'S DEBUT WORK, INSCRIBED\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e8vo., 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSecond edition. This copy \u003cb\u003einscribed by the author the year after publication:\u003c\/b\u003e “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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEthel 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eRhymes from the Factory \u003c\/i\u003econtains 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Clarion\u003c\/i\u003e, to work for \u003ci\u003eThe Woman Worker\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eSongs of a Factory Girl\u003c\/i\u003e, was published in 1911. Of these new verses, two were subsequently set into song, and were dedicated to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.  \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarnie 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Clear Light,\u003c\/i\u003e an anti-fascist journal. She later published a series of sonnets in the Anarchist paper \u003ci\u003eFreedom\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of Carnie’s best-loved poems, ‘The Bookworm’, appears in the present volume: \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eI own no grand baronial hall,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eNo pastures rich in weaving corn;\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eLeave unto me my love for books, \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAnd wealth and rank I laugh to scorn…\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA scarce work, even more so inscribed thus.\u003c\/b\u003e I have been unable to trace the recipient.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSKU: \u003c\/strong\u003e1800280\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fold the Corner","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57550803337540,"sku":"1800280","price":750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0943\/8711\/0212\/files\/1800280.jpg?v=1792601264","url":"https:\/\/foldthecornerbooks.co.uk\/products\/carnie-ethel-rhymes-from-the-factory","provider":"Fold the Corner Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}