Samuel Bamford and Middleton rushbearing

Samuel Bamford (1788-1872) is best known as the Lancashire weaver whose Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839-41) is perhaps the best surviving account of the Peterloo era. Beyond this, however, Bamford was also a literary figure and poet, and his autobiographical volume Early Days (1848) is an equally indispensable account of the social life of a Lancashire handloom weaving community in its late eighteenth-century golden age.