News at Eleven: For a long time the standard pattern was

for the poet to be discovered by an upper- or middle-class person who became a kind of patron, and introduced the poet to polite society, or to the edges of it,  and the possibility of publication, which would be directed towards a readership among the urban educated (which did not at the time mean London exclusively). But from the later eighteenth century onwards, "untaught" poets were beginning to show independence, addressing themselves to their own class and participating in radical movements, especially Chartism.There was an enormous increase in output after 1800, and an increasing participation of the urban poor which made the newly developed northern cities and mill towns--the "manufacturing districts"-- particularly rich in poets.

from The Fortnightly Review: Can there be a modern 'working-class' poetry?

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