The Black Hole of Calcutta
Peer, too just, too proud to share
Millions wrung from toil and care!
Righteous peer, whose fathers fed
England’s poor with untax’d bread!
Ancient peer, whose stainless name
Ages old have giv’n to fame!—
What shall bread-tax do for thee?
Make thee poor as mine and me;
Drive thee from thy marble halls
To some hovel’s squalid walls;
Drive thee from the land of crimes,
Houseless, into foreign climes,
There to sicken, there to sigh,
Steep thy soul in tears and die—
Like a flower from summer’s glow,
Withering on the polar snow.
Church bedew’d with martyrs’ blood
Mother of the wise and good!
Temple of our smiles and tears,
Hoary with the frost of years!
Holy church, eternal, true!
What for thee will bread-tax do?
It will strip thee bare as she
Whom a despot stripp’d for thee;
Of thy surplice make thy pall,
Low’r thy pride, and take thy all—
Save thy truth, establish’d well,
Which—when spire and pinnacle,
Gorgeous arch, and figured stone,
Cease to tell of glories gone—
Still shall speak of thee and Him
Whom adore the seraphim.
Power, which likest Heaven’s might seem,
Glorious once in freedom’s beam;
Once by tyrants felt and fear’d,
Still as freedom’s dust revered—
Throne, established by the good,
Not unstain’d with patriot blood,
Not unwatch’d by patriot fears,
Not unwept by patriot team—
What shall bread-tax do for thee,
Venerable Monarchy?—
Dreams of evil, spare my sight!
Let that horror rest in night.
![]() Ebenezer Elliott was an iron and steel dealer, activist and poet, who devoted much of his energies to demanding change in working conditions, and for the reform of the Corn Laws (restricting foreign importation of grain in the UK). Elliott blamed his father’s death and his own initial failure in business on the Corn Laws. After a period of being homeless, near starvation and suicidal, his second business venture prospered but the trauma was the catalyst for his activism in forming England’s first society o call for reform of the Corn Laws: the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread Tax Society (founded in 1830). His bitterness poured itself into his poetry and he was dubbed “the Corn Law Rhymer.” His poems were read not only in his own country, but in France and the United States. English historian Asa Briggs called Elliott “the poet of economic revolution.” The title of this poem shows that Elliott believed conditions in England were as bad as the awful prison in India known as the Black Hole of Calcutta — “When our unfortunate countrymen were confined in the Black Hole of Calcutta, they complained of intense thirst and the prison resounded with cries of “Water! Water!” Water was given them, but it increased their sufferings for the thing wanted was not water but air. Behold an exact picture of bread-taxed England…. But the thing wanted is “bread” in exchange for cottons, woolens and hardware; and no other thing can supply the want of that one thing any more than water could supply the want of air in the Black Hole of Calcutta.” As you can see, Elliott did not shrink from the use of strong language to get his point across. |
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