Samuel Bamford, autobiographer, cultural historian, journalist, poet, political agitator and weaver, was born on 28 February 1788 in Middleton, near Rochdale in Lancashire, the fourth child of a cotton spinner and a boot-maker's daughter. He began as a weaver, learning his trade as a boy, before becoming, briefly, a sailor then a warehouseman. In 1810, after marrying his lover Jemima Shepherd (Mima), with whom he already had a child (Ann who he described as his “love child”), he returned to weaving. Bamford was proud of his trade, as the title of his first collection of poems, The Weaver Boy<…