A Great Man in Clogs: Performing Authenticity in Victorian Lancashire

Abstract

in the second half of the nineteenth century, working- and middle-class Lancashire advocates argued for the legitimacy of their regional dialect and for their rightful place in Britain's literary history. Although today Elizabeth gaskell and the reverend William gaskell are the best known of these supporters, at the time the Lancashire dialect writers Ben Brierley and Edwin Waugh—who broke into the middle- class literary world, ironically, via their performance of working-class authenticity—were recognized as central to this movement. Brierley's and Waugh's short stories, with their multiple layers of narration, provided a space to negotiate their complex personas at the threshold between middle and working class, revealing the fluidity of nineteenth-century categories of class.