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Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour” and Mary Collier’s “Woman’s Labour” have not received appropriate critical attention, despite their importance in the eighteenth-century poetry. Duck, who once worked as thresher, significantly rewrote the georgic tradition in the eighteenth-century poetry, proving his poetic talent, while the contemporary society was skeptical about the poetic ability of the working-class poets. More importantly, Collier, the first working-class woman poet in English literature, began working-class women’s poetic tradition. Nevertheless, both Duck’s and Collier’s poetry do not articulate working-class consciousness, nor create any poetic discourses that challenge the political and economical oppression towards the working-class people in the contemporary society; their poetry rather compromises between social protest and resignation.
