Class and the Canon

Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780-1900

K. Blair, M. Gorji, K. Blair, M. Gorji

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349440375, 9781137030320
• eBook ISBN: 9781137030337
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.

Introduction

Kirstie Blair

What! write my Life? my – Life! – and can this be
From such a Bard – a modest Bard – like me?
To write, regardless of the wreaths of fame,
MY OWN MEMOIRS, and print them with my Name!
And no Apology? – no Preface here?
No page inscribed to Commoner, or Peer?
’Tis even so!

(James Bird, from Poetical Memoirs, 11.1–7, in McEathron, 2006, p. 237)

James Bird’s opening to his Poetical Memoirs (1823), a long ottava rima poem in the style of Byron’s Don Juan, is a signal example of the self-consciousness with which labouring-class writers engaged with poetic tradition. Many if not most volumes of eighteenth and nineteenth-century verse by labouring-class authors opened with subscription lists and other statements of patronage; many contained prefaces authored by better-known poets or critics; many introduced their authors not simply by name, but by profession or political affiliation – ‘Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton’ (Ann Yearsley), ‘The Factory Girl’ (Ellen Johnston), ‘The Corn-Law Rhymer’ (Ebenezer Elliott), ‘Surfaceman’ (Alexander Anderson). Whether in the words of the poet him or herself, or their patron, an apology for the poet’s lack of learning or skill, a reference to his or her difficulties in achieving the education and the leisure time necessary to produce poetry, was also standard. These were the expectations which governed the publishing of ‘labouring-class poetry’ from the 1700s well into the Victorian period, and framed it for readers and critics.

In Bird’s ironic tone we hear a chorus of imagined higher-class reviewers and readers, shocked at his temerity in abandoning the required apologetics. When he qualifies ‘Bard’ (in itself, a loaded term) with ‘modest’, it is deliberately ambiguous whether he is referring to himself as ‘modest’, ‘having a moderate or humble estimate of one’s own abilities or achievements’ (OED 3(a)) and thus ambitious in attempting to write his memoirs, or whether ‘modest’ is a term that his imagined audience would apply to him, in the sense ‘of a person’s origins or social circumstances: undistinguished on the social or economic scale’ (OED 4). This latter kind of modesty should, the implication is, bar him from straying into genres and subjects associated with more ‘distinguished’ poets. Bird’s point is, of course, that the two are indistinguishable: poets ‘undistinguished on the social and economic scale’ are – if they want to be published – required to perform humility. In stating his intention to break with these conventions, Bird also subscribes to them, because he makes it clear that his poetry can be read within the tradition he satirizes. By noting that he is not following the standard practice of ‘modest’ poets, he suggests that he might, in fact, be one of them.

Bird provides a good example with which to open this collection, because it is not so much that he is, self-evidently and indisputably, a ‘labouring-class poet’, as that he is aware that he will be constructed as such, and participates in this construction himself. His social or class position was ambiguous: he was the son of a farmer, educated to a manual trade as a miller and in precarious economic circumstances, yet he later moved into a more ‘literary’ profession as a bookseller in Yoxford, Suffolk. Like many labouring-class poets, he had a strong local presence and was assisted into print by the editor of the Suffolk Chronicle, but he was also very well read and wrote a number of poems on London institutions and traditions (McEathron, 2006, pp. 235–6). Scott McEathron comments that ‘our understanding of his place within the tradition must take into account the fact that he was – in relative terms – a learned, successful and worldly figure’ (p. 236). In Bird’s learning, his ambition, and his display of these through the reworking of poetic forms and styles popularized by a more established poet, he is very similar to many of the poets discussed here. In addition, he presents an instance of how important the work of twentieth and twenty-first century literary critics and editors can be in constructing a labouring-class tradition. Far from a well-known figure, it is through his inclusion in Pickering & Chatto’s 6-volume Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets (Goodridge, 2003, 2006), a landmark collection in the field, that Bird is most likely to come to the attention of scholars and students working in this area.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen an explosion of scholarship on labouring-class poetry and poetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thanks to online resources such as the Labouring-Class Writers Project at Nottingham Trent or the ‘Minor Victorian Poets and Authors’ database, dedicated to Gerald Massey and his contemporaries, and to new anthologies, such as Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, Kevin Binfield’s The Writings of the Luddites (2004) or Florence S. Boos’ Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain (2008), scholars have a far wider range of available resources and information in this field than ever before.¹ Yet with the recovery of so many poets, it has also become clear how much remains to be said about these writers and their importance in the literary cultures of their time, not to mention in their political, social and religious contexts. Since Robert Southey’s foundational essay of 1831, ‘The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets’, labouring-class poets have often been judged sui generis, placed in a particular category and most frequently assessed in terms of their relationships with others within that category. The many outstanding monographs on labouring-class poetry and poetics, by critics such as Martha Vicinus, Donna Landry, William J. Christmas and Bridget Keegan, frequently compare these poets to each other, highlighting the existence of connections and a sense of community within this specific tradition. As Keegan observes:

Despite the efforts of many patrons and early critics to capitalize upon the supposed uniqueness and rarity of the figure of the labouring-class genius, these poets were well aware of one another’s work, often writing poems addressing or commenting upon fellow authors. (2008, p. 2)

John Goodridge’s essay in this collection is an excellent example of one such relationship between John Clare and Robert Bloomfield, two of the best-known labouring-class writers of their period. Tracing such connections is vital in showing how conscious these poets were about their own place within a rapidly changing landscape of labouring-class literature. Yet, as these critics invariably acknowledge, the construction of a labouring-class tradition is a tricky process, because it inevitably involves situating a poet with regard to his or her personal circumstances, and judging these circumstances as either qualifications or disqualifications for labouring-class status. Christmas, for instance, whose focus is on ‘occupation-specific poems’, decides to define this strand of poetics as ‘plebeian’ and includes ‘only those poets who have some form of labouring experience in their background’ (2001, pp. 23, 29). In discussing her decision to include some eighteenth-century women poets in her study and not others, Landry refers to their ‘borderline status’, observing that ‘signs of genteel social connection work against equating “laboring class” with what it might mean to be of “humble” or “obscure” birth’ (1990, pp. 9, 8). These critics are aware of the difficulties in locating a poet within a particular class, but they still have to make the choice about whether to do so or not. As others build on this foundational work, however, these constructed categories begin to seem more and more porous. Nigel Leask’s work on Robert Burns, here and in his recent Robert Burns and Pastoral (2010), is a particularly strong example. Burns did have labouring experience, but he was working in the fields alongside men who were his employees. Was a tenant farmer in mid-eighteenth century Ayrshire labouring class, or not? Such research, by uncovering the complexities of social standing in a particular time and place, quietly works against over two centuries of constructing Burns as the typical labouring-class poet, and shows the question to be, if not moot, unanswerable. Many of the essays in this collection similarly focus on poets whose status as ‘labourers’ is, at most, liminal. Samuel Thomson and William Barnes, for instance, were schoolmasters, and Barnes eventually acquired a university education. Ann Yearsley may have started out working in a dairy, but as Kerri Andrews implicitly shows, by the time she produced her later poetry she was (at points) relatively well-off, and unquestionably well read. If poets managed to write their way out of a more precarious existence dependent on hard manual labour, were they still labouring class? Or if they came from more ‘middle-class’ backgrounds, like Barnes, but wrote in a linguistic mode strongly associated with labouring-class poetics, is their poetry then ‘labouring class’ even if they themselves were not? What the essays on individual poets in this collection show is that eighteenth and nineteenth-century poets, journalists and critics were also engaged with these questions, and involved in efforts to locate their own work and that of others in relation to a perceived notion of a labouring-class poetic tradition.

If the notion of ‘labouring’ is not at all straightforward, ‘class’ is, of course, equally tricky. E. P. Thompson, whose shadow still looms large in literary criticism on this topic, influentially argued that ‘we must exert caution against any tendency to read back subsequent notations of class’ in relation to the eighteenth century, a period when ‘class was not available within people’s own cognitive system’ (1978, p. 148). The arguments of Gareth Stedman Jones, which prompted a ‘linguistic turn’ in class-based historical studies, made the important point that what matters is the language that particular groupings (in his case, the Chartists) used, and used of themselves. It was not so much the concept of class, as the word itself, that was ‘not available’ to eighteenth-century poets, as Christmas notes in his helpful discussion of this issue.² In the title of this volume, we have retained ‘class’ as a useful shorthand for indicating how the poets and critics discussed here located themselves within their societies, whether ‘high’ or ‘low’, ‘polite’ or ‘rude’, rich or poor. Of course, the division between ‘labouring class’ (most often used to refer to poets from the long eighteenth century) and ‘working class’ (most often used to refer to poets from the Victorian period) is also problematic, not least because it helps to create artificial divisions between so-called literary periods. The span of this volume, more than a century, follows recent work, such as Keegan’s, that notes the continuity of a poetic tradition across eighteenth-century, ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ categories: discussing the Victorian poet and postman Edward Capern, Keegan comments that he ‘wryly shows his awareness of how the limited expectations for what a labouring-class poet can and should produce have not changed greatly from the 1730s to the 1870s’ (2008, p. 178). Victorian labouring-class poets, whose knowledge of contemporary poetry was often relatively limited due to its high cost, often had a stronger relationship as readers with eighteenth-century predecessors than with the poets of their own time, and still wrote very much in the shadow of Burns. Of the individual poets discussed here, only Ebenezer Elliott potentially fits into the notion of a ‘working-class’ poet in the sense of a worker in the newly industrialized Victorian city – and, as Marcus Waithe demonstrates, this was in large part wishful thinking and deliberate misrepresentation on the part of contemporary critics like Carlyle rather than an actual reflection of Elliott’s circumstances.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century poets were operating in a period when, it has been argued, notions of a ‘canon’ of English poetry, consisting of its ‘classics’, were being solidified. Jonathan Brody Kramnick pronounces, in the opening lines of his study, ‘The English literary canon achieved its definitive shape during the middle decades of the eighteenth century’ (1998, p. 1). Thomas F. Bonnell, while differing from Kramnick’s emphasis on the importance of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton in this canon, agrees that the ‘multi-volume poetry collections that sprang from the British press after 1765’ offered ‘for the first time in material form a presumptive canon of English poetry’ (2008, p. 1). By the Victorian period, it is safe to assume that certain English poets were more or less definitively canonized, or, in Paul Thomas Murphy’s helpful term ‘“established” – that is, having a strong and reasonably steady reputation among other classes, particularly among the middle class’ (1994, p. 3). Of course, labouring-class writers did not always have access to the works of these ‘established’ writers, nor did they necessarily share the high estimate in which they were held. Murphy’s seminal Toward a Working-Class Canon demonstrates that working-class journalists in the nineteenth century made a deliberate effort to promote ‘a canon for their class’ that, Murphy argues, ‘had very little in common with that of the middle class’: ‘The journalists looked at every work they quoted or reviewed from a completely new, class-based point of view’ (p. 53). Further studies, such as Mike Sanders’ in-depth examination of the poetry columns of the Chartist press, have investigated in detail the significance of poetry in political cultures and the shifting ways in which Chartist literary critics and poets engaged with questions of canonicity. Sanders’ essay here, and also the essays by Matthew Campbell and Waithe, focus specifically on the construction of a labouring-class ‘canon’ by nineteenth-century critics in their periodical and newspaper criticism. As Waithe and Campbell show, however, this project also engaged critics writing for more established middle-class periodicals, such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine or its new, ambitious imitator, the Dublin University Magazine. Much was at stake for writers like Carlyle and Samuel Ferguson – both personally and politically – in championing particular forms of labouring-class verse.

The effort to push the labouring-class poet into a particular mould is not unique to eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics and patrons, from Southey onwards. As noted above, twentieth and twenty-first century critics have productively engaged in attempts to define a canon of labouring-class poetry and poetics, as well as trying to introduce this poetry into the classroom and make it part of the institutionalized ‘canon’ of texts taught to undergraduate students. The most recent criticism, however, is often notable for its attempts to complicate perceptions of labouring-class poets as valuable for the ‘authenticity’ of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?
• 3 Constructing the Ulster Labouring-Class Poet: The Case of Samuel Thomson
• 4 Sociable or Solitary? John Clare, Robert Bloomfield, Community and Isolation
• 5 John Clare and the Triumph of Little Things
• 6 ‘No more than as an atom ’mid the vast profound’: Conceptions of Time in the Poetry of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley
• 7 The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Car-lyle, Ebenezer Elliott, and the ‘active poet’
• 8 Samuel Ferguson’s Maudlin Jumble
• 9 Courtly Lays or Democratic Songs? The Politics of Poetic Citation in Chartist Literary Criticism
• 10 Edwin Waugh: The Social and Literary Standing of a Working-Class Icon
• 11 William Barnes’s Place and Dialects of Connection
• Index