Labouring‐Class Poetry

Abstract

Beginning with the appearance of the ‘Thresher Poet’ Stephen Duck in the 1730s and continuing for decades thereafter, a series of aspiring poets with labouring‐class origins gained a foothold in Britain's literary marketplace. Described variously as ‘humble poets’, ‘uneducated poets’, ‘peasant poets’, and ‘natural geniuses’, these writers often attracted substantial patronage and became short‐term objects of public fascination. By the early nineteenth century, dozens of such poets were publishing in Great Britain, some of whom – such as Robert Burns, Robert Bloomfield, James Hogg, and John Clare – are now recognized as important figures in the literary and cultural development of Romanticism (McEathron 1999). Many others, including Ann Yearsley, Janet Little, James Woodhouse, and Isabella Lick‐barrow, to name only a few, are now emerging as important research subjects. Scholarship in the area has increased dramatically in the last 25 years, with scholars engaged in parallel tracks of inquiry. One of these tracks has been primarily editorial, involving the recovery and re‐publication of obscure or forgotten labouring‐class texts. In the cases of important poets including Clare, Hogg, and Mary Leapor, this editorial work has given rise to modern, fully annotated scholarly editions. It has also led to several expansive anthologies which, taken together, provide excellent surveys of the range of poetry produced by these writers (Maidment 1987; Goodridge et al. 2003, 2006; Boos 2008). The other research track has been, broadly speaking, critical, with scholars attempting to assess the lives and literary achievements of these figures (Landry 1990; Waldron 1996; Bold 2007; White 2007), their significance for improved understandings of eighteenth‐century and Romantic‐era print culture (Christmas 2001), and their linkages to radical culture and labouring‐class consciousness (Goodridge 1995; Janowitz 1998). While it was once assumed that labouring‐class poetry was, by definition, a literary endeavour dedicated to portraying the vocational lives of domestic servants, farm labourers, cobblers, and other workers, it has become clear that this definition was far too narrow. It failed to convey the topical richness of the poetry itself, the high‐literary aspirations nurtured by some of its practitioners, and the diversity of biographical circumstances from which these poets arose. In this regard, even as we now know more about labouring‐class poetry than ever, the question of what, in generic terms, constitutes a ‘labouring‐class poem’ has become both a more urgent question and one with more possible answers, involving, for example, considerations of generic categories like ‘river poetry’ and ‘garden poetry’ (Keegan 2008).