No traveller along this road, not excepting even kings and queens, statesmen, and other great historical figures, has left so striking and interesting an account of travelling along it as the narratives of two pedestrian journeys between London and Manchester, written by Samuel Bamford. These accounts are supremely interesting in themselves, because they were written by one of the people, and because they put on record, as no other chronicler has done, or could have done, the England of 1807 and 1819, as seen by an intelligent and thinking working-man on tramp. It is an England removed not only by the space of a century from our England, but a crowded century such as never before was seen. But if we would thoroughly understand Bamford’s intensely interesting narratives, which I do not scruple to reprint here at length, we must learn what manner of man he was who wrote them. [Sidenote: _SAMUEL BAMFORD_] Samuel Bamford was born in 1788, at Middleton, near Manchester, and was a weaver and a descendant of weavers. He was by temperament something more; was, indeed, blest, or curst, with the literary taint in its extreme form; was, in short, a poet. At the time when Bamford was growing up, and an eager recipient of ideas, England—and especially the operatives’, the artisans’, and the agricultural labourers’ England—was not the free country it is now. The working-classes had no votes, practically no education, and only too often, as the result of troubles caused by incessant foreign warfare, insufficient food. The country seethed with discontent—not a passing discontent, but a long, wretched era of sullen ill-will that outlasted Bamford’s own active period, and culminated in the Chartist agitation of 1839. Bamford, of course, was not fully informed. His writings teem with pictures of the wrongs of Lancashire operatives, while from his descriptions of rural England it might almost be supposed that the agricultural labourer of that time lived an ideal existence; which of course was by no means the case. He only knew at first hand the case of the weavers and the cotton-spinners, which was desperate enough; for that was the era when machinery began to supplant the hand-loom, and manufacturers were growing rich while many of the workers starved in the combined circumstances of dear food and lack of employment. For himself, as a youth, he seems to have been light-hearted enough, and it was the sufferings, the wrongs, and the disabilities of others, rather than of himself, that eventually led him to become a political agitator. He could, however, scarce help being a rebel, for he came of those who had been convinced Jacobites, and had, later, become Methodists; and was himself, as we have seen, an idealist and something of a homespun poet.