Mary Bailey lace runner and poet

 

Mary Bailey was a lace runner in Nottingham in the early part of the nineteenth century, which meant she embroidered lace designs onto machine-made net. It was a skilled job requiring artistic talent, good eyesight and neat, accurate work and was essential to the Nottingham lace trade because, at that time, lace machines could not produce patterned lace, only net ground. Mary was one of many poorly paid lace workers whose lives generally went unremarked. But Mary was different, because in 1826 she published a pamphlet of 13 poems to raise money to help her to support her young children and sickly husband. These poems are not the anodyne verses expected from a working-class woman who knows her place. Instead they reflect her life and work, her hopes and fears and the struggle to give her family a decent life. One reflects on the hard work required to make lace and why it should be fairly remunerated. Here are the first two verses:

You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address/And hope you will take it in hand/And at once condescend on poor runners to think/When dress’d at your glasses you stand

How little you think of that lily-white veil/That shields you from gazers and sun/ How hard have we work’d, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d/When those beautiful flowers we run.

Another poem thanks the lady who came to her house with bread one evening when she had nothing to feed her children. One poem shames another lady who ‘desired me to pray for the death of my youngest child’ because she considered Mary had too many children. Another reports how Mary challenged two middle-class girls she saw tormenting a locust and highlights the morality of the story. Other poems record events in her life and people she knew. Mary died in 1828, two years after the poems were published, leaving her husband and nine children below the age of thirteen. I do hope they survived and prospered after all her efforts to look after them. What an amazing woman.

My information about Mary Bailey came from a booklet published by Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham in which her poems are reprinted and introduced by John Goodridge.