Through the economic upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution and his experience in the movement for political reform in and around Manchester, Samuel Bamford witnessed the transformation of working-class life during the first half of the nineteenth century. His renown as a writer rests less on his commonplace though popular poetry than on his prose chronicles, closely observed and finely detailed records of everyday existence and cataclysmic events. E. P. Thompson declares Passages in the Life of a Radical (1841, 1843), Bamford's two-volume autobiography recounting his tumultuous career as a reformer during the years from 1816 to 1821, to be "essential reading for any Englishman." Of no less value is Bamford's account of social conditions in his diary-like collection, Walks in South Lancashire and on Its Borders, with Letters, Descriptions, Narratives, and Observations, Current and Incidental (1844), and in Early Days (1848-1849), his charming and informative account of growing up in a changing...