The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830 by William J. Christmas (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 969 of Johnson's anxious pulling of strings to secure the release of Frank Barber, his black servant, from the navy (whether he wanted to leave or not). That Johnson strongly supported many women intellectuals of his time is clear and important; that this support was far from universal, was qualified by some very conservative views, and sometimes concealed a sexual component, needs to be acknowledged also. Johnson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, but nowhere more so than in the pamphlet in which he attacked the American colonists' opposition to the Crown. To look back at Johnson looking both forward and back is certainly to imagine his continuing force in the future, and at its best this book tries to do more than make Johnson our contemporary, or consign him to a dispiriting process of redemption through historicization. All the essays 'keep past and present in reciprocal play' (p. 12) in a way of which Johnson would have approved. He might, however, have expressed some scepticism about the book's needlessly embattled stance?and about its unnecessarily ugly title. University of Liverpool Paul Baines The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing,and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830. By William J. Christmas. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 364 pp. ?44. ISBN o874i3 -747-oInitial reaction to the title of this book will inevitably be slightly negative?is there indeed room for yet another analysis of that peculiarly eighteenth-century preoccu? pation with writers described in their own times as variously 'illiterate', 'primitive', 'uneducated', or, less often and more positively, 'self-taught'? Any new assessment will need both a fresh approach and new information to be of value. William Christmas seeks to provide both; he has seen what he believes to be a clear development during the period in the production and reception of this writing which has not previously been identified; and he adds to the familiar list some names which are not so well known, and whose work tends to support his thesis?that although, as so many people have maintained, 'class' in the Marxist sense did not exist in the eighteenth century, a kind of proto-class-consciousness, its early glimmerings , can be perceived to be developing in the relations between those he calls 'plebeian' poets and their patrons. 'I seek', he says, 'to identify a range of discursive currents within eighteenth-century print culture, and within English plebeian poetry in particular, that became the raw material out of which "class" would be explicitly articulated and defined in the nineteenth century' (p. 51); and he later asserts that the 'critical task, as I see it,is to situate these poets and their work within relevant cultural/ historical contexts in order to come to terms with the extent of their participation in counter-hegemonic practice' (p. 62). The rest of the book attempts, in four more chapters and an epilogue, to demon? strate how relative submission to the patron's agenda in the early part of the period gave way to a growing confidence and sense of literary self-worth in mid-century, which itself led to downright confrontation towards the end; he provides detailed ac? counts ofthe careers of sixteen poets from Stephen Duck in the 1730s, through poets like Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands in mid-century, to Ann Yearsley, Robert Bloomfield, and John Clare in the later period, who relied upon supporters with some kind of influence to get their work into print. Their experience, he suggests, demonstrates the developmental curve that he has in mind. The danger with such a tight schema is that readers, especially those in any degree familiar with the material, will become distracted by reflection on the acceptability 970 Reviews of what inevitably looks like generalization or partiality. I guarantee that practically every reader will want to adduce some exception or call in question some statement. Fortunately, however, the author's very evident knowledge and enthusiasm diminish this objection: in the event he does not become so imprisoned by his thesis as his firstchapter seems to predict; his accounts of these complex relationships are lively and readable (I...