Songs for the Millions, and other poems

Born in Manchester, and a bookbinder by trade, Benjamin Stott was an active trade unionist and member of the Chartist movement. Songs of the Millions, a suite of seventeen short poems in which Stott experimented with a variety of forms, was his best known work. Poverty and famine, injustice and the brutality of the police and their spies, solidarity and resistance are his themes. A devout militant Christian, Stott saved some of his most powerful words for the clergy who urged the working masses