빅토리아 시대 맨체스터와 문학 공동체

Abstract

Victorian Manchester is admittedly identified as the ur-scene of industrialization and urbanization during the Industrial Revolution since Engels’s appalling description of the city. Engels’s influence on studies of nineteenth-century Manchester is still pervasive, yet this overriding image of Manchester as the typical industrial town might not fully represent the cultural capacity of the city considering the emergence of working-class literary culture and poetic community in the early Victorian age. Based on Raymond Williams’s analysis of culture of England during the 1840s in The Long Revolution, this paper expands the object of analysis into the works of self-taught artisan poets and their literary culture. Aside from the famous industrial fictions of Elizabeth Gaskell, Manchester had a kind of literary public sphere of working-class writers and printers that could be built into a community of culture. Especially the Manchester Poets, or the Sun Inn group of the late 1830s and early 1840s formed their own literary community based on local writings and their reciprocal feelings circulated among them. One of the Sun Inn group members John Critchely Prince’s identification of himself as the mediator of cultural reproduction among his own class reveals his belief of the possibility of cultural community. In the conclusion, this paper suggests that future research of female artisan writers will provide the more profound portrait of the city.