Radical poetics and the pursuit of Northumbrian distinctness: the verse of Lewis Proudlock, 1856–1899

This article compares two competing visions of Northumbria in the latter half of the nineteenth century, conceived of as a distinct region within England, and encompassing both Northumberland and County Durham. Building on the research of Robert Colls in Northumbria: History and Identity, which examines the romantic regionalism of the antiquarian movement he terms the ‘New Northumbrians,’ it explores how sentimentalism, primitivism, and historicism shaped their interpretation of the region’s past, setting this vision against that of the pitman poet Lewis Proudlock. While both perspectives framed Northumbria as a land of historical ruins and fading grandeur, Proudlock recast this narrative of decline as the consequence of feudal-like exploitation by coal owners, a condition imagined as one day being reversed by pitmen, and which stood at odds with the antiquarian idea of Northumbria as an archaic land, made anachronistic by the progress of modernity, its decline irreversible.