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Life in Manchester
~1770 - early 1780s
Although her father was blacklisted from London in 1770,Robert Knipe was able to maintain some connections with the London Assurance Company after moving his family to Manchester,a growing and tumultuous industry town. Textile workers rioted between 1779 and 1780 to protest poor working conditions.Cholera was rampant in the town’s water supply, of which Eliza's younger brother died at the age of 5.
It was while living in Manchester that the 13-year-old Eliza started to write her own poetry. She would later publish them as “Poems on Various Subjects” in 1783 when she was 18. She modestly wrote in the preface of the collection that the poems were “merely the juvenile productions of a female pen.”