Masculinity and the English Working Class

Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction

Ying Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415541695
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135860318
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes.

The book also maps the relationship between two trends: the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies (in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership); and a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors.

The book mimics this point of convergence by pairing three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). Ying considers the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. Then mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley are re-read from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points.

Chapter One
Introduction: Gender and Genre

“Working-class man.” The phrase invokes a familiar jumble of nineteenth-century stereotypes: angry Chartists; rosy peasants; liveried manservants, shifty or pretentious; picturesque idlers in pubs and on street corners; and even a ploughman poet or two. These are the crude character types of popular imagery. They find subtler expression in the characters of John Barton, Adam Bede, Steerforth’s Littimer or Sam Weller; Henry Mayhew’s street interviews; and the brief vogues enjoyed by Robert Burns and John Clare. These stereotypes are so familiar as to be among the standard furnishings of the Victorian novel. What would Margaret Hale do without factory “hands” to tame, and how would we know Oliver Twist’s worth without his underclass tormentors? These images of working-class men are all delineated through the middle- and upper-class media of novels, sociological research and poetic patronage—perhaps appropriately, given their function. The very density of this type of representation creates the impression that outside this bourgeois context, not much literature exists about the working class. Yet this is not the case. Social and labor historians, for example, have written extensively on working-class culture of the nineteenth century. Their sources are largely official: court records, parish registers, Hansard and newspapers. Yet they also consistently draw on a body of autobiographical writing by working-class authors in order to introduce intimate detail and analyze individual responses to larger pressures or ideas.¹

By 1827, working-class autobiography was enough of a cultural phenomenon for James Lockhart to complain about the trend in an unsigned article in the Quarterly Review:

The classics of the papier mâché age of our drama have taken up the salutary belief that England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia. Modern primer-makers must needs leave confessions behind them, as if they were so many Rousseaus. Our weakest mob-orators think it a hard case if they cannot spout to posterity. Cabin-boys and drummers are busy with their commentaries de bello Gallico; the John Gilpins of “the nineteenth century” are the historians of their own anabaseis, and, thanks to “the march of the intellect,” we are already rich in the autobiography of pickpockets. (“Autobiography” 149)

Even if Lockhart’s judgment represents the most reactionary extremity of public opinion, his animadversions against working-class autobiography reveal something of its relative prominence within the genre in the early nineteenth century.² His disdain for the populist possibilities of autobiography identifies one of the genre’s most exciting characteristics. As Felicity A. Nussbaum argues in The Autobiographical Subject (1989), “[a]utobiographical writing allows the previously illiterate and disenfranchised to adopt a language sufficiently acceptable to be published” (37). Indeed, Lockhart’s fulminations constitute evidence of the very popularity of working-class autobiography. If, as Lockhart suggests, English literature (broadly defined) is “already rich in the autobiography of pickpockets,” it is only because English readers demonstrate an intense interest in pickpockets’ lives. The persistent presence of “low” autobiography in the literary marketplace confirms the voracity of readers for the lives of the obscure and the ignoble—or, as Lockhart would have it, the “drivellers.”

Lockhart’s choice of the singular form of the word “autobiography” for multiple pickpockets reveals his conviction that the masses have, between them, only one story to tell. Yet one of the main characteristics of working-class autobiography, criminal or otherwise, is its remarkable variety. In The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984), John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall offer an annotated bibliography of 804 autobiographies by self-described working-class authors. According to the editors,

[t]he most obvious distortion in the body of autobiographies is the small number written by women. Of the main group, just seventy, less than one in ten, record the lives of daughters, wives and mothers from their own point of view. Few of these were actually published in the nineteenth century, and over half of this meagre collection are still in manuscript . . . In other respects the autobiographies can be seen as more representative of the nineteenth century working class. In geographical terms, for instance, the spread of birthplace and residence is virtually comprehensive . . . [T]he range of occupations cited by the autobiographers extends far beyond the respectable artisans and skilled industrial workers who might be expected to dominate the genre . . . 64 printers, 57 teachers, 43 novelists and poets, 170 journalists and 24 compositors and printers . . . 90 soldiers, 43 errand boys, 66 domestic servants, 93 farm labourers, and 52 farm boys and bird scarers . . . The list begins with a Board of Trade Commissioner, but it ends with ten thieves and a ticket tout. (xviii-xix)

Apart from the breadth of geographical and occupational perspectives represented in Burnett et al’s modern bibliography, working-class autobiography is also characterized by a striking diversity of form. Nussbaum and Linda H. Peterson each cite a thirty-four volume series entitled Autobiography: A Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves (1826–33) as a significant event in the development of the autobiographical genre. In Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography (1999), Peterson refers to it as “the first known attempt to create a literary collection of autobiographical writing” (4). The series, as she observes, is organized “not by mode or subgenre but by the writers’ public roles” (28). For Nussbaum, the anthology represents “a kind of eighteenth-century canon, the first of its kind, for the first time” (2). In addition to statesmen, men of letters (including Gibbon and Hume) and artists, the Autobiography series includes the lives of the less exalted, including two actresses and the noted “Swindler and Thief” James Hardy Vaux. Nussbaum uses the parameters of the series to argue that

these early texts are granted their place because the varied lives are curious and original; their scope rather than their tight structure is given primacy . . . they include diaries, journals, letters, briefest narratives, lengthy memoirs, and even biography . . . this canonization and dissemination of certain eighteenth-century texts also makes the structural and thematic discontinuities of autobiographical work legitimate by placing them within a frame of the humanist self. (3–4)

This emphasis on content, rather than form, reveals a remarkably broad and diverse understanding of autobiography as a genre. And, as Nussbaum remarks, even

more prescriptive definitions of the genre of autobiography did not begin to ossify . . . until the mid-twentieth century . . . Since then the formal aspects of the genre have been frequently codified as narrative with a beginning, middle, and end which purports to be true, is told retrospectively, and whose author is the same historical being as the first-person narrator and protagonist. (4)

In her carefully argued history of “The Ideology of Genre,” Nussbaum demonstrates that the highly codified autobiographical theories posited by critics such as Philippe Lejeune, Elizabeth Bruss, Roy Pascal and Wayne Shumaker³ are retroactive curtailments of an earlier autobiographical tradition, rather than constructed profiles of a particularly cohesive genre.

Given its diversity of form, the generic characteristics of working-class autobiography, as observed by its earliest critics, are surprisingly consistent. David Vincent is the historian who reminded present-day scholars of the existence of working-class autobiography: in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1981), he announces the discovery of a cache of autobiographical writing by self-proclaimed working-class men. Approaching the autobiographies as a social historian, Vincent uses them to construct a portrait of working-class family life between 1780 and 1850. He suggests that the autobiographical form may have been “attractive to the few, inexperienced, working class novelists who found in its structure an acceptable solution to the considerable technical difficulty of constructing a novel” (2). However, unlike Nussbaum, Vincent goes on to locate the roots of working-class autobiography in two specific literary conventions. The first is the spiritual autobiography, which is “based upon the assertion of the right of every individual to determine his spiritual identity . . . this conviction was important both for the commitment to free speech which it embodied, and for the encouragement it gave to the most humble and non-literate of individuals to analyse and set down their own experiences” (16). The second is the tradition of oral ballads and broadsides.⁴ Because of its basis in these two distinctly un-bourgeois literary traditions, Vincent rejects the suggestion that “working-class autobiographers were consciously imitating a borrowed form of self-expression” (37); rather, he believes that the appearance of the first working-class autobiographies parallels, rather than follows, a resurgence of interest in middle-class autobiography that would come to dominate the genre in the nineteenth century. Although Vincent and Nussbaum disagree on the question of literary influences, they concur that fluidity between understandings of autobiography and memoir is central to the claims of working-class autobiography as a subgenre.

In Subjectivities (1991), the only book-length study of working-class autobiography from a literary perspective, Regenia Gagnier focuses on the idea of “bourgeois subjectivity,” which she defines as the author’s “being a significant agent worthy of the regard of others, a human subject, as well as an individuated ‘ego’ for on[e]self” (141).⁵ She then concedes that for “working-class autobiographers . . . [subjectivity] was not a given. In conditions of long work hours, crowded housing, and inadequate light, it was difficult enough for them to contemplate themselves, but they also had to justify themselves as writers worthy of the attention of others” (141). Gagnier’s interest in subjectivity is self-consciously “pragmatic.”⁶ This leads to the division of autobiographies into three general categories: conversion and gallows tales, storytellers and politicians, and confessions and self-examinations. It also gives rise to summary statements such as this:

In showing that “memories” often come from southern agrarian workers who hoped to preserve local history for members of the community, “narratives” from organized northern industrial workers who sought to edify other workers and compete historically with the bourgeoisie, and “confessions” from transients who hoped to gain cash by giving readers an immediately consumable sensation, I do not intend to limit or confine these works within rigid definitions of genre. Rather, I mean to indicate some uniformity in how texts are written, read, and historically assessed in terms of the social contexts of value, consensus, hegemony, domination, or appropriation. (168)

Even in this general overview, however, the emphasis on subjectivity is shaky. Gagnier demonstrates that the autobiographies are intended to serve specific practical, and often social, functions rather than represent an intrinsically interesting life. Consequently, the autobiographers’ very justifications for publication are removed from the idealized notion of the self-analysis of an individuated bourgeois ego. Working-class autobiographers seem to doubt the intrinsic value of a public self-examination in the autobiographical tradition of, for example, Wordsworth or Rousseau. On Gagnier’s evidence, traditional understandings of bourgeois subjectivity are not the most relevant models through which to approach working-class autobiography.

Like Gagnier, Nussbaum approaches the question of autobiographical subjectivity from a materialist feminist perspective. Because of her emphasis on the necessity of historical specificity in her discussion of eighteenth-century autobiography, Nussbaum sets her study of the discursive subject against the background of eighteenth-century humanism. Rejecting Lacan’s model of the discursive subject because it is ahistorical (32–33), she sees a parallel between the de-centering of the subject and the dispersal of hegemonic power amongst different institutions in Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus. This fragmentation of both hegemonic power and subjectivity leads Nussbaum to conclude that autobiography enables non-hegemonic writers (“the previously illiterate and disenfranchised” mentioned above)

to envisage new possibilities in the interstices between discourses or to weave them together in new hybrid forms . . . By stepping outside narrative conversion models and privately experimenting with other forms, the autobiographical writers at once form the private self necessary for an emergent market economy and produce a space for interrogating received assumptions about identity. (37–38)

Nussbaum is primarily concerned with historicizing the development of autobiographical subjectivity between A. D. 1600 and 1800, and she makes no claims for the relevance of her thesis to a Victorian autobiographical tradition. Yet her broad vision of the genre—de-centered, potentially subversive, ever shifting—also describes many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography.

Class: A Short Glossary

This study begins with the premise that working-class subjectivity is more than an absence of bourgeois subjectivity. However, before proposing my own readings of working-class masculine subjectivity, I wish to make clear what I mean by each of these terms. More than forty years ago, E. P. Thompson defined “class” as something that “happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” (9). Thompson’s conception of class as “a relationship, and not a thing” (11)—by which he means a structure or a category—endures, although it has also been subject to extensive criticism and revision. Perhaps most prominent among his critics is Patrick Joyce, who objects to Thompson’s Marxist assumption that the “common experiences” uniting men grow directly from their relationship to the means of economic production in a capitalist society. For Thompson, these experiences underlie the creation of culture. Instead, working from a post-structuralist perspective, Joyce flips Thompson’s model and insists that “culture does not come at the end of things, but rather at the beginning” (Democratic 4). Within the context of the working-class autobiographies studied here, however, a third possibility emerges. Drawing upon the work of both Thompson and Joyce, I argue that experience and culture exist in a dialectical relationship: they continually shape and re-shape one another, as the subject attempts to write his experience as part of the culture, and the culture moulds the experience of the author-subject.

Joyce locates his work within “the linguistic turn.” This approach, however, offers its own limitations. He does not, for example, clearly distinguish between the languages of late twentieth-century historians and nineteenth-century activists and commentators, and he appears to presume that mastery of language is itself fixed and consistent. This is why, to illustrate his argument about agency as something “built into the nature of language” (14), Joyce selects the hyper-literate diary of the dialect poet, journeyman printer, salesman and secretary Edwin Waugh, whose identity is built around the conscious manipulation of language. Ironically, Joyce’s use of “the linguistic turn” is itself destabilized in the hands of many working-class writers whose control of language, oral and written, differs substantially from that of the ruling class and modern intellectuals. Building upon his post-structuralist argument about culture as the foundation for experience, Joyce asserts that scholars must question the historical constructs of “history,” “society” and “the social” as well as the idea of class. He worries that

historians . . . have inherited the view of class as system-like, so missing the point that when nineteenth-century contemporaries used the language of class they did not usually have such views in mind. They, “workers” and “middle classes” alike, have anachronistically been understood to have viewed class as the outcome of new “systems,” social and industrial, whereas their usages were moral and political, not “sociological” in these senses. (Joyce 17)

This distinction is dramatized in the cases of the working-class autobiographers studied here. Although each man clearly recognizes his role in a particular economic or political organization, his identification with this place is specific to its context and does not necessarily determine his subject position in other areas of his life.

The language of class terminology is imperfect and highly contested, and clarity is sometimes better approximated through loose definitions rather than laborious specificity. Consequently, throughout this book, I use the terms “working class” and “middle class” to refer to a broadly defined relative social identity or category—what might, before the nineteenth century, have been referred to as “rank” (Williams, Keywords 61, 69; Sewell 334). In the large category “working class,” I include those who are “engaged in, or dependent on, manual labour” (Benson 3).⁷ Some scholars favor the term “plebeian.” In The Struggle for the Breeches (1995), Anna Clark prefers it to “working-class,” arguing that its utility lies in its vagueness and breadth: unlike “working-class,” the term “plebeian” is not related to a means of economic production and it does not suggest unity amongst its constituents (30). However, I prefer to avoid its pejorative connotations. The ambiguities of social terminology and their connections with capitalist means of production also exist with respect to the idea of a “middle class.” As Raymond Williams observes, the term suggests a social distinction rather than an economic one (Keywords 25), and using it in tandem with the phrase “working class” creates an erroneous suggestion of parity in the implied comparison. The term “bourgeois” is contested even amongst Marxists, and must be understood in the context of its unique historical significance as a distinct, non-aristocratic, leisure class in France (Williams, Keywords 46). I will use it only occasionally to refer to “falsely universal concepts and institutions” (Williams, Keywords 47) which are culturally and historically specific but pass as universal—for example, when discussing the influence of generically understood “bourgeois” values upon those who are not, economically and politically, members of the bourgeoisie. The term “proletariat” in the context of this study refers to a politicized, self-conscious, urban industrial class. In contrast, rural and non-industrial workers are discussed under the general term “working class” or within the context of their w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction: Gender and Genre
• Chapter Two In Gentleman's Service: Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837 and The Pickwick Papers
• Chapter Three Representing the Working Man: The Autobiography of a Working Man and Mary Barton
• Chapter Four Autodidacts and Men of Letters: My Story and Alton Locke
• Chapter Five Other "Others": Incidents in a Gipsy's Life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index