Class and Poetic Communities: The Works of Ellen Johnston, "The Factory Girl"

Abstract

For critics who seek to bring working-class women's voices into the expanding canon of Victorian poets, lack of access and an attendant lack of interest pose formidable problems. Few working women had the patronage or the material means to publish poems in volume form, a fact that some scholars have mistaken for creative silence. Other critics have offered ideological explanations for absence: that "a gradual defusing of working-class combativeness," along with the increasing popularity of prose autobiography, caused any "identifiable discourse of working-class women's poetry . . . to fold back on itself" after the eighteenth century; 3 or that "women were silenced by their class's adherence to the discourse of domesticity, which made it difficult for them to write of their own experiences as women who worked." 4 By focusing on the work of Scottish poet and power-loom weaver Ellen Johnston, I aim to reopen areas that many critics have overlooked or shut down: to help recover poetry as a revealing, if highly fraught site of Victorian working-class women's expression; and, in doing so, to question the still-common insistence on radical resistance as the key component of working-class subjectivity. Where Landry would find dissolution and defeat, for example, I see strategic affirmation, as Johnston creates poetic personae that negotiate the [End Page 207] often conflicting demands of her gender, her class, and her craft. I will also suggest that by casting our critical net more widely to include other outlets for working-class women's writing, such as the poetry columns of local penny papers, we can gain a better sense not only of still-hidden voices, but also of the Victorian era's multiple communities of writers and readers and tastes. This wider consideration may also help us to define less monolithically the ideological force of such concepts as poetic authority, publicness, and female respectability that have been held so harmful to working women's literary expression. Precariously situated but far from silent, Ellen Johnston claimed the right to voice both private emotion and social critique; and for her efforts, admiring readers titled her "bard."