Publish the Poetry of William Cunliffe

Simon Rennie, Associate Professor of Victorian Poetry at Exeter University, has gathered together the work of the Victorian, Burnley Dialect poet William Cunliffe from various sources and is producing an introduction to the poet’s first collection of verse. The Knives Forks and Spoons Press is seeking £500 in donations to cover the production costs of this volume. Once published, this important text will be available internationally through the book trade.

William Cunliffe, a blacksmith and poet from Burnley, has featured in various national press outlets over the past decade and has an entry in the ODNB. His poetry was featured in the Times in 2016 and the Sunday Times in 2018. Subsequently that year he was mentioned or quoted variously in the Guardian, BBC Radio Four's World at One programme, and the Smithsonian Magazine. However, his poetry, published between 1862 and 1864, was only discovered in the pages of the Burnley Free Press and General Advertiser in 2015, and his work has never been collected. Lancashire towns have particular relationships with their Victorian dialect poets - Rochdale has Edwin Waugh, Blackburn has William Billington, and Ashton-under-Lyne has Samuel Laycock. Burnley, currently riding high with its football team in the Premier League, currently has no access to the work of its town dialect poet beyond a few pieces published on the Cotton Famine Poetry database.