Ebenezer Elliott, active in poetry, commerce, and politics, is best known to literary historians as "the Corn-Law Rhymer." He was born at the New Foundry, Masborough, near Rotherham, in Yorkshire, on 17 March 1781, just eight years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. In an autobiographical fragment Elliott represented his ancestors as raiders who stole cattle on the Scottish-English border. (However, his biographer January Searle cautions against a literal acceptance of this account.) His father, Ebenezer, was a clerk in an iron foundry, a strict Calvinist, and a radical republican, whom his son called a "Jacobin." His mother, Ann, was an invalid for most of her adult years. A relative later reported an anecdote concerning his first few hours of life: "In the hurry and confusion attendant upon his birth, he was laid in an open drawer, which was presently shut by another person, who had no knowledge of...