The "Sun Inn" Group

The "Sun Inn" Group

Also known as the Manchester group, this was the most high-profile and prolific English city group in the nineteenth century. The "Sun Inn" group (named after the Manchester pub where they met) went on to launch the Lancashire Authors Association and contributed to an anthology, The Festive Wreath (1842), edited by John Bolton Rogerson, which included contributions by John Critchley Prince, Isabella Varley, George Richardson, Robert Story, Robert Rose ("the Bard of Colour"), Elijah Ridings, William Gaspey, Richard Wright Proctor, John Mills, Thomas Arkell Tidmarsh, John Scholes and Eliza Battye. It included Alexander Wilson’s poem "The Poet’s Corner" (first printed as a broadside, also printed in Maidment, 163-6), which was sung at the second meeting of the Lancashire Poetical Soiree and refers to 28 local poets and supporters (their names are annotated by hand by Isabella Varley on a copy reproduced by Maidment). Ben Brierley’s Journal regularly published verse by other Mancunian labouring-class poets, most notably Fanny Forrester.