"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

Abstract

working-class poets Ellen Johnston, Lucy Larcom, and Ethel Carnie represent the conflicted status of the individual, female, working-class poet acclaimed by the middleand upper-class readers. Unlike the literary careers of many nineteenth-century male British working-class poets, or even of the American girl poet, Lucy Larcom, the poetic profession of Johnston and Carnie did not permanently thrust them into the middleand upper-class societies of mid-nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury Great Britain. Instead, like British factory worker and magazine poet Fanny Forrester, Ellen Johnston, and Ethel Carnie rose to prominence among the middle class and then faded from middle-class view into the obscurity of the industrial community. Johnston and Carnie knowingly wrote to and compiled poems for a disparate audience for their bound vol-