Waugh, EDWIN

Waugh, EDWIN, the Lancashire poet, was born January 29, 1817, at Rochdale. As a youth he was apprenticed to a local printer and bookseller, but on the expiration of his apprenticeship he seems to have devoted himself almost entirely to literature. With his removal to Kelsal near Manchester he became one of the most active members of the Manchester Literary Club, of which he was at one time president. His first sketches of Lancashire life and character appeared in the Manchester Examiner, and at once attracted friendly attention to the author. Among Mr Waugh's numerous prose writings may be cited his Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine, the Besom Ben Stories (possibly the best of his humorous pieces), The Chimney Corner (a series of exquisite village idylls), and the admirable descriptions of natural scenery in his Tufts of Heather, Irish Sketches, and Rambles in the Lake Country. But it is as a singer rather than as a story-teller that our author will be best remembered. For several years he had been in the habit of contributing dialect songs to various periodicals, and these pieces, first collected in 1859 as Lancashire Songs, secured for their author immediate recognition as a poet. Rivalling the Cumbrian poems of Robert Anderson, and comparing favourably with the best work of the rustic followers of Burns, these rude lyrics won the hearts of his countrymen by the power, pathos, and kindly humour with which he paints the homely ways and thoughts of his country-people; indeed few poems enjoy such popularity in Lancashire as Waugh's 'Come whoam to thi childer an' me.' As an expositor of dialect Mr Waugh merits high praise. The nice shades of local patois, current in villages separated by only a few miles, are tenderly discriminated, and the idiom is nowhere maintained to the tedium of the general reader, but relieved by brilliant descriptive passages written in Mr Waugh's terse and pure English. Outside his native county Mr Waugh's rendering of dialect is somewhat less happy, and the specimens of the country speech of Cumberland and Ireland, as given in Jannock and Irish Sketches, can scarcely be accounted a success. In 1882 Mr Waugh became the recipient of a small pension from the Civil List. With failing health he removed to New Brighton, Cheshire, where he died, April 30, 1890, of cancer in the throat. Personally Mr Waugh was the centre of a large circle of friends, who delighted in his genial wit and powers as a raconteur. The best edition of Waugh's collected works is that in 11 vols., with Caldecott's illustrations.