Abstract
This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically.
Highlights
Chartism was undoubtedly one of the largest, longest-lasting, and significant working-class movements in nineteenth-century Britain
Its principal objective was to expand the franchise while reforming the electoral and parliamentarian systems, but as historians have almost universally noted ever since Robert Gammage’s first History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (1854), it was very much a cultural movement, with Chartist lending libraries, theatrical clubs, an enormous radical press, and so on. With such emphasis placed on establishing or confirming an independent working-class culture, Chartists were acutely aware of the need to develop their own literary aesthetic as well, or as Thomas Cooper put it in Cooper’s Journal, 2 March 1850, “a literature of your own
As Donna Landry argues in the “Foreword” to A History of British Working Class Literature, “Aesthetics and politics need to be understood as distinct categories of analysis and experience
Summary
Chartism was undoubtedly one of the largest, longest-lasting, and significant working-class movements in nineteenth-century Britain. Young Men of the Working Classes”, ends up echoing the tension to be found while reading together the sophisticated versification of his most famous poem, “The Purgatory of Suicides” (1845) and the everyday discourses in his short-story collection, Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1845), both of which were written while Cooper was imprisoned in Stafford Gaol The strangeness of his approach to the development of a working-class aesthetics did not seem to worry Cooper, whose journal was subtitled “or, Unfettered Speaker, and Plain Speaker for Truth, Freedom, and Progress” but is chock-full of poetry and erudite “Thinkings” from Milton, Shelley, Carlyle, Locke, as well as “A Power-Loom Weaver” and many other working-class poets.
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