Toward A Working Class Canon

Noting that working-class writers and editors actively sought to define for themselves the spiritual and political role literature played for an emerging working class, Murphy concludes that while there was no uniform working-class interpretation of literature, working-class journalists conducted a lively and continuing debate about literature, and that their agreements and disagreements show a thriving and evolving aesthetic.

This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political ends—and for their largely working-class readership—long after those works’ original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwin’s Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process.

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.

In Britain, the period that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century marks the emergence of the working classes, alongside and in response to the development of the middle-class public sphere. This collection contributes to that scholarship by exploring the figure of the "working-class intellectual," who both assimilates the anti-authoritarian lexicon of the middle classes to create a new political and cultural identity, and revolutionizes it with the subversive energy of class hostility. Through considering a broad range of writings across key moments of working-class self-expression, the essays reevaluate a host of familiar writers such as Robert Burns, John Thelwall, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Ann Yearsley, and even Shakespeare, in terms of their role within a working-class constituency. The collection also breaks fresh ground in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship by shedding light on a number of unfamiliar and underrepresented figures, such as Alexander Somerville, Michael Faraday, and the singer Ned Corvan.

This book examines what motivated the ordinary British man to go to France in 1914, especially in the early years when Britain relied on the voluntary system to fill the ranks.

"All scholarship is a collective endeavour, but this book, and the context in which it was completed, has taught us more about the necessities of collective intellectual work, and its material and emotional conditions, than we would have liked. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown came to our cities just as we completed the first draft of the book, but with a lot more work to do. Even before the coronavirus, we were conscious of the extent to which intellectual labour depends on other forms of labour, often unacknowledged and provided by others"--

This book explores the contribution made by Chartist poetry to the struggle for fundamental democratic rights.

An illustrated collection of new essays with valuable reference material on the performance and reception of Shakespeare's plays.