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In his pioneering presentation ofVictorian self-taught poets and poetry, The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Brian Maidment organizes his material into three principal areas: "Chartists and Radicals," "The Parnassians," and "Lowly Bards and Homely Writers."1 Editing my own volume of Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1860-1900,1 found these categories useful and accurate in describing much of what was written.2 The most compelling poems for me, how ever, were those that one way or another breached the walls between them. Some of these import "Parnassian" and political writing into "homely" poems, or use dialect forms and local materials to comment on social and cultural issues. They tend to represent communities in serious rather than sentimentalized ways (though this division is by no means clear-cut, as we shall see). And they are often concerned with trying to transform the highly insecure literary position of being a laboring-class poet into a more sustainable means of self-expression and self representation. By 1860 a tradition of laboring-class poetry was widespread and well established, if by no means secure for the poets involved. A database of laboring-class poets that I have been preparing with colleagues on the laboring class poets project currently lists 1,420 such poets published in Britain and Ire land between 1700 and 1900, and well over half of these were writing in the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Clearly there were many hundreds of laboring-class poets seeking effective modes of writing and print outlets for poetry in this period. In this essay I shall examine a number of examples of their poetical output and consider some of the literary strategies these poets adopted and critical issues these strategies raise. In the scholarly "recovery" of hidden or lost traditions like laboring-class poetry, the issue of quality is not any less important for having the potential to be raised, as it were, in bad faith. However much one wishes to resist the familiarly |
