Ben Brierley's Monument, Queen's Park, Manchester

Summary

Printed picture postcard, showing the monument made by Manchester sculptor John Cassidy (1860-1939) to Manchester poet Ben Brierley (1825-96). Brierley, who was also a journalist and novelist, is shown reading from his own work, presumably the Lancashire dialect poems for which he was well known. The monument was erected in 1923 in Queen's Park, to the North of Manchester. The postcard must have been made around that time, as it is printed on the reverse with a postal rate which was already out-of-date, the rate for postcards rising from 1/2 pence to a penny in 1922. The print is a phototype - a photograph transferred to a metal plate for printing - produced with two ink colours, red and black, with the red being used to accent flowers in a foreground urn, and the roof of a distant building, seen across the Rochdale Road.