Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

Poet and dialect writer. Pseudonym: “J. T. C” and “Th’ Owd Weighver.” Alternative signature: “J. T. Clegg.” Born in Milnrow. Studied Latin in school. Worked at his father’s cotton mill and brother’s printing business. Married Miss Flinton in 1881. Organist and choirmaster of St. Mary’s Church, Wardelworth, Rochdale. Contributed to the Rochdale Observer and Manchester Weekly Times. Author of David’s Loom: A Story of Rochdale Life in the Early Years of the Nineteenth Century (1894) and Works of John Trafford Clegg: Stories Sketches and Rhymes in the Rochdale Dialect (1895). Author information from Chambers’s Journal ledger entry for “The Skylark,” which gives the poet as J. T. Clegg, of 13 Trafford Street, Rochdale (NLS Dep 341/369). Biographical information: John Trafford Clegg, The Works of John Trafford Clegg (“Th’ Owd Weighver”): Stories, Sketches, and Rhymes, Chiefly in the Rochdale Dialect, The Aldine Press, 1895, pp. xi-xxiii. (AC, CC)