Introduction

Monica Smith Hart

For much of the nineteenth century—and for much of the study of Victorian literature since then—our understanding of “the laboring classes” or “the working classes” has been shaped by middle-class voices who claimed to speak on their behalf. Novelists, social critics, and reformers left behind a powerful archive of working-class representation, but they often spoke about workers rather than making space in the literary sphere for works to speak for themselves. The poetry and prose of working-class men and women complicates and corrects that picture. It reminds us that workers were not just objects to be pitied or reformed, but rather fully autonomous subjects who wrote, published, and theorized about poetry on their own terms.

I argue below for the importance of reading working-class poetry as a vital counterpart to more familiar middle-class narratives. It shows how these writers disrupt neat definitions of “the working class,” enrich our understanding of nineteenth-century aesthetics, and challenge the very notion of literary “disinterestedness.” In short, reading working-class poetry broadens our sense of what literature was, who produced it, and why it mattered.

A note about terminology

In discussions of nineteenth-century poetry, critics often distinguish between “laboring-class” and “working-class” writers. Laboring-class is usually applied to poets writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—figures like Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, or Ann Candler—whose verse emerged from rural or agricultural contexts and whose social status was defined by manual labor in agrarian economies. The term working-class became more common in the Victorian period as Britain industrialized, referring to writers such as Gerald Massey, Ellen Johnston, and Janet Hamilton, whose lives and texts were shaped by factory labor, urban poverty, and industrial politics. While the categories overlap, “laboring-class” tends to evoke rural contexts and earlier literary traditions, whereas “working-class” signals the industrial, urban, and politically organized identities of the nineteenth century.

So: Why Should We Read Working-Class Poets?

First, we should read working-class poetry in order to complicate our understanding of who and what the working-classes were during the nineteenth century. As Donna Landry and William Christmas both note,^[1] as students of the nineteenth century we derive much of our information about laboring men and women from two sources: social/political writings concerned with the working-classes written by middle-class writers, and fiction concerned (whether directly or tangentially, e.g. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South, or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights) with the situation, condition, or plight of working-class characters penned by middle-class writers.^[2] In both instances, a segment of the population speaks for another, presumably because the workers lack access to literacy as well as literature.^[3] A careful examination of working-class poetry, however, reveals the constructed voices of radicals like John Barton, Alton Locke, Felix Holt, of domestic servants like Nelly Dean, of factory workers like Bessy Higgins, of urban working men like Stephen Blackpool to be only one side of a multi-faceted question: who were the workers?

We should read working-class poetry as a corrective to the narratives about class that we as students of the period inherit from middle-class writings. The novel, poetry, and non-fiction prose all provide, whether explicitly or implicitly, some understanding of class relations. But what working-class poetry can remind us is that for every fictional laborer there was a real-life counterpart. For every fictional Nelly Dean, there was an Elizabeth Hands or a Christian Milne writing verse about her life as a domestic.^[4] For every fictional Alton Locke there was a Robert Bloomfield or a Gerald Massey arriving in London for the first time, eager for both literacy and literature,^[5] and a Thomas Cooper composing verse within the confines of his prison cell.^[6] For every frail and pathetic Bessy Higgins there was a confident and brave Ellen Johnston struggling for both her rights as a worker and her place as a writer.^[7] While we should look to neither the novel nor the poetry for an all-encompassing account of class relations or class-based experience, it is foolhardy to ignore an important side of the story.

We should study working-class poetry because it reveals workers to be as multi-faceted as the problem of characterizing them. Scattered all over the British Isles, in urban-industrial as well as rural areas, these men and women worked as weavers, tailors, seamstresses, milkmaids, power loom operators, bricklayers, cobblers, threshers, general farm hands, and domestic servants. Their poetic aims were as varied as their occupations. Some sought to inspire their fellow workers to political action through their verse (e.g. Gerald Massey, Thomas Cooper, Ebenezer Elliot).^[8] While others sought to console their fellow men and women (Ellen Johnston), some wanted to instill pride in their readers for both their lives and their work (Jessie Russell, Janet Hamilton).^[9] Some working-class poets worked to emulate and uphold what they viewed as poetic ideals and ideologies (e.g. Robert Bloomfield, John Askham, Ben Brierley, Sam Bamford).^[10] Some wrote to escape (James Bird)^[11] and some to attack (Elizabeth Hands, Christian Milne, Frances O’Neill) their middle-class patrons; others put pen to paper for precisely the opposite reason: to court their patrons and thereby hopefully enhance their own reputations and movement into a better way of life (Charlotte Caroline Richardson, Thomas Cooper, John Clare, J.C. Prince).^[12] What a study of working-class poetry will not reveal about the working-classes, however, is a neat and tidy definition of “their” aims, ideologies, purposes, or plans. Careful study of working-class poetry deliberately disrupts the “us-them,” Philistine vs. Populace structure of much contemporary middle-class writing in prose and fiction.^[13]

We should read working-class poets in order to enrich our understanding of poetic theory during the nineteenth-century. Many of these poets also wrote prose prefaces and autobiographies to append to their volumes, which further demonstrate the richness and complexity of the “aims” of verse during the period. MPs read poetry in Parliament,^[14] poets published regularly in major newspapers, verse was read aloud in taverns and inns, ballads were sung in music halls: in many ways, poetry permeated Britain during the nineteenth century. Careful study of the stated aims of working-class poets both threatens and improves how we think about the “purpose” of verse for British writers of the period.

Consider, for example, how much broader a story of “the purpose of poetry” and the “role of art” from around 1790 to 1900 we can tell if we take into consideration the prefaces of Gerald Massey and Thomas Ince alongside those of Wordsworth, Arnold, and Wilde,^[15] and those of Ann Candler, Janet Hamilton, and Ellen Johnston next to Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans.^[16] Next to Keats’s letters we can place J.C. Prince’s and Edwin Waugh’s letters describing the difficulties of appearing in print.^[17] Suddenly the struggle to not only create a poetic voice but also maintain one’s ideals both within the art form and within one’s own life take on much larger dimensions. For instance, Massey takes specific issue with a Wordsworthian privilege of the leisure time and domestic support system necessary to recollect emotion in tranquility,^[18] while Ince’s direct rhetoric and indifference to public opinion of his artistic views provides an engaging comparison with Wilde’s late century explication of artistic ideology through pithy aphorism in his preface to Dorian Gray. Charlotte Smith’s Chancery struggles become an interesting contrast to Johnston’s civil suit for back wages,^[19] and Janet Hamilton’s construction of self as a matron of both the domestic sphere and the world of letters makes a compelling late-century comparison with Felicia Hemans’s early century construction of self as “Mrs. Hemans.”^[20] And when placed next to Prince and Waugh, the story of Keats as the long-suffering, short-lived, critically humiliated poet of promise becomes not a lone story of exceptional mistreatment and despair, but simply—and tragically—one of many such stories.^[21]

We should read working-class poetry in order to challenge the notion of “disinterestedness” that permeates much of late nineteenth-century literary aesthetics. Beginning with Kant and reinforced by Arnold (for whom literary criticism is “the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world”),^[22] the privileging of the disinterested aesthetic cultivates much of the response to literature of the period. But as Bourdieu reminds us, cultural and cultivated sensibilities derive not from any form of objectivity, but instead from a specific cache of cultural capital provided by the individual’s socio-economic placement and privilege.^[23] And it is those writers and critics with access to this cultural capital who were in many significant ways controlling access to literacy and publication not only for one another but also—and particularly—for working-class writers. For the ability to distinguish “good” poetry from the “bad,” or as Arnold would have it, the very “best that is known and thought” depends upon access to a specific sort of education and training: entrance to Bourdieu’s class of “intellectuals.” And if the dominant aesthetic is predicated upon such explicit notions of objectivity and implicit notions of educational status, then an entire group of writers (and readers) are automatically excluded from study.

If we do not read or study working-class poetry because of an adherence to an idea(l) of objective aesthetics, we have been seduced by the provocative (yet limited) ideas of what Bourdieu characterizes as an aesthetic ideology. Reading working-class writers challenges, therefore, not only nineteenth-century ideas of the aesthetic, but our own concept of aesthetics as well. These writers and their verses direct us to a place of self-examination that allows us to interrogate and then come to a much richer understanding of our own intellectual, academic, and aesthetic categories.

Works Cited

• Arnold, Matthew. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. 1865.
  —. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Essays in Criticism. Macmillan, 1865, pp. 1–41.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1979. Translated by Richard Nice, Harvard UP, 1984.
• Bloomfield, Robert. The Farmer’s Boy. 1800.
• Brierley, Ben. Chronicles of Waverlow. 1863.
• Bamford, Samuel. Poems. 1821.
• Candler, Ann. Poetical Attempts by a Cottager. 1803.
• Clare, John. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. 1820.
• Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854.
  —. Oliver Twist. 1837–39.
• Elliott, Ebenezer. Corn Law Rhymes. 1831.
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855.
• Hamilton, Janet. Poems and Essays of a Miscellaneous Character. Glasgow, 1863.
• Hands, Elizabeth. Poems. 1789.
• Hemans, Felicia. Records of Woman. 1828.
• Johnston, Ellen. Autobiography, Poems and Songs. Glasgow, 1867.
• Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols., Harvard UP, 1958.
• Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796. Cambridge UP, 1990.
• Massey, Gerald. The Ballad of Babe Christabel and Other Poems. 3rd ed., 1854.
  —. Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love. 1850.
• Milne, Christian. Simple Poems on Simple Subjects. Aberdeen, 1805.
• Prince, John Critchley. Hours with the Muses. Manchester, 1841.
• Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge UP, 2009.
• Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets. 1784.
• Steedman, Carolyn, Tim Hitchcock, and Keith McClelland, editors. Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840. Macmillan, 1994.
• Sweet, Nanora, and Julie Melnyk, editors. Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Waugh, Edwin. Poems and Songs. Manchester, 1859.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia UP, 1958.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ward, Lock, 1891.
• Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 1802.