City Artisans Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction Donna Landry and William J. Christmas When Raymond Williams wrote of the democratizing of print culture that began in the early modern period as a "long revolution," he sounded a celebratory note. He did not, however, suggest that the transformation would be an easy one.1 Recovery work in literary history has enriched our understanding of the many writers of laboring background who achieved some success in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many of these writers for whom the epithets "humble," "uneducated," or "labouring" appeared as essential labels—credentials as necessary for entering the literary marketplace as press cards for press conferences—were poets. Their struggles often strike modern readers as heroic, and their careers may seem miraculous. Touched by the numinous hand of celebrity, their sweaty and poorly paid day jobs now put behind them, they emerge in authorial splendor, possessed of slim volumes of verse. The emergence of these writers into historical view as laborers as well as poets, however, is accompanied by certain critical consequences. As representatives of the working class, the downtrodden and exploited, they are often scrutinized for their political awareness and critical capacities as much as for their mastery of verse forms or ingenuity of poetic innovation. Ideology critique and political-contextual reading have been the dominant forms of critical analysis brought to bear upon these poets. Yet this emphasis might be said to contradict the animating purpose of these writers, in so far as they were first and foremost poets. Whatever their political alignments, poets have traditionally engaged with intoxicated or metaphysical inspiration, if not bardic prophecy; they have committed themselves to demanding forms and to technical expertise, whether they were writing for Ottoman courtiers, city artisans, fellow drinkers at taverns and alehouses, or country gentry, and whether their chosen medium was the broadside ballad or the epic. The most common question elicited by endeavors to bring neglected writers to light has always been "But were they any good?" Pious answers have often [End Page 413] been given to this question: intrinsic historical interest, history from below, righting the historical record with regard to the actual contributions of working-class men and women, challenges to bourgeois aesthetics. Analyzing laboring-class poetry according to strictly formal criteria without some obeisance to the ideological or political stakes involved has rarely been undertaken, if at all. It remains an open question as to whether or not the aesthetic as a category of analysis can ever float entirely free of political or ideological determinants. Yet to subordinate, if not bury entirely, formal and aesthetic questions in favor of social and political ones is to be once again complicit in tying laboring-class writers so tightly to their social difference from polite culture that their achievements cannot be appreciated artistically, but only sociologically. In raising such aesthetic matters, we hope this special issue of Criticism might go some way toward rectifying previous critical imbalances between history and the literary, or politics and aesthetics, with regard to laboring-class writing. There has now been a sufficient body of textual recovery work done on British laboring-class poets for their collective literary achievement to begin to appear to public view. Laboring-class poets could be glimpsed in revisionist anthologies like Roger Lonsdale's influential Oxford pair or Andrew Carpenter's Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, but in order to engage in a serious reading of these poets, a good archive or a penchant (and patience) for microfilm was essential.2 In just the last few years, however, a wide range of laboring-class poetry has appeared in edited editions both large and small. Noteworthy volumes include Robert Bloomfield's Selected Poems, Isabella Lickbarrow's Collected Poems, the last installment of the magisterial Clarendon edition of John Clare's complete poems, and The Works of Mary Leapor, the first critical edition of a laboring-class poet not named Clare to appear since the late nineteenth century.3 The publication of the monumental Pickering and Chatto edition of poetry by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laboring-class writers marks a watershed in terms of public accessibility and potential knowledge.4 Here, over its six volumes and some twenty-five...

The Burden of Citizenship: Artisans, Elections, and the Fuero Militar in Santiago de Chile, 1822-1851

On December 13, 1845 the recently founded Santiago newspaperEl Artesano Opositor(The Opposition Artisan) published a letter submitted by “twenty artisan friends of Cerda.” The letter related the tragic case of José Agustin Cerda, a young tailor, soldier in the civic militia, and member of an electoral association called theSociedad de Artesanos de Caupolicán(Caupolicán Artisans Society), who had been arrested on November 12 by the city's military prosecutor on the charge that he was involved in an anti-government “conspiracy.” Claiming innocence, Cerda, according to his companions, denied his involvement in the alleged conspiracy “with noble arrogance.” As a result he was locked in iron shackles in a military prison, causing his legs to swell up and his illness-weakened lungs to struggle for air. A follow-up article in the newspaper announced that Cerda was still being held in that “unjust and inhumane” condition two months later, along with several other city residents who were linked to the electoral associations of the liberal opposition in Santiago. While the outraged authors of the letter toEl Artesano Opositorsingled out the Cerda case for its malicious effects on their friend, they clearly saw the incident as part of a larger problem: the routine and systematic mistreatment of all artisan militiamen by the conservative governing regime. Not content simply to demand the release of their colleague, the “friends of Cerda” demanded the complete reform of a political system that denigrated the honor, dignity, and patriotism of all the city's artisans. “Understand,” continued the letter in a provocative flourish, “that by attacking the innocent life of Cerda you attack the lives of all the artisans of the Republic.” “We should expect more,” it concluded solemnly, “from the men we elevate with our votes, defend with our blood, and maintain with our sweat and labor.”

Of "Haymakers" and "City Artisans": The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook's Songs of Labor

In 1854, in the pages of her penny weekly Eliza Cook's Journal, poet Eliza Cook (1818-1889) proclaimed her optimism about the future of the working classes:

In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860

In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860. Edited by Maurice D. McInnis in collaboration with Angela D. Mack with essays by J. Thomas Savage, Robert A. Leath, and Susan Ricci Stebbens. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xix, 352. Illustrations, color plates. $75.00.) Science, Race, and Religion in American South: John Bachman and Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815-1895. By Lester D. Stephens. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 338. Illustrations. $39.95.) Colonial Charleston, William Francis Guess notes in South Carolina: Annals of Pride and Protest (1956), considered itself London of Southern Coast. As these two books illustrate, this attraction to European-and especially British-ideas and taste continued into antebellum period, shaping elite's notion of what it meant to be cultured. For wealthy Charlestonians, education and travel abroad provided opportunity to acquire manners and appurtenances of Europe's aristocracy. Among most important of these indicators of cultural refinement was appreciation for fine arts. In Pursuit of Refinement, a collaborative project of Gibbes Museum of Art and Historic Charleston Foundation, examines European experiences and purchases of Charleston's elite and, through these, chronicles creation of the most Anglophilic urban culture in America (63). The volume begins with a description of colonial and antebellum milieu; continues with essays on various Charleston collectors and collections; and finishes with an annotated catalogue of 1999 exhibition. As both essays and illustrations suggest, cultural horizons of elite Charlestonians extended far beyond borders of their state. The catalogue is beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched, containing many items from private collections never before exhibited in public. It convincingly demonstrates that not only were Charlestonians great patrons of European culture, but also that their own creative works were influenced by European motifs and styles. John Izard Middleton, for example, attended Cambridge and spent extended periods of his life studying art and architecture on continent. According to Susan Ricci Stebbins, he ranks as of first American landscape watercolorists and draftsmen and one of great art collect[ors] in America (82). Theodore Stebbins similarly describes Washington Allston as the most sophisticated American of his generation, a master of classical landscape before becoming first great American romantic painter (158). Because In Pursuit of Refinement is primarily a catalogue of an exhibition, it contains little analysis or criticism of art itself beyond broad generalizations. Nor does it consider impact of European models on city's artisans and laborers, majority of whom were black. It is important to remember that although Charleston's oligarchy may have emulated British aristocracy, it was an African workforce, not a European peasantry, that provided basis for its prosperity and leisure. In his examination of Charleston's naturalists, historian Lester D. Stephens argues that antebellum city was remarkable for its scientific achievements as well as its material culture. Stephens focuses on Lutheran theologian and naturalist John Bachman and five contemporaries -Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis Reeve Gibbes, Francis Simmons Holmes, and John McCrady-who shared his interest in natural history. These six individuals made Charleston a recognized center of natural history in antebellum South. John Bachman is pivotal figure in Stephens's study, and his work illustrates intersection of science, race, and religion in culture of region. A native of New York, Bachman's poor health led him to Charleston in 1815, where he became pastor of St. …

Major dietary changes in nineteenth-century Europe.

While there is still a great deal of research to be done eating patterns in the past, from the evidence accumulated so far is safe to say that most Europeans entered the nineteenth century as primarily grain eaters. Virtually every other food available, would seem, fell into the category of luxury items. Luxury foods like meat, fish, cheese, eggs, vegetables, and fruits were readily available to the upper reaches of society, but the great majority of Europeans ate them a very, very limited basis [I]. We still do not know for sure to what extent vegetables were consumed before 1800. But one thing is definitely clear—most artisans and peasants in European society up to 1800 had to consume breadstuffs morning, noon, and night. This overdependence a single staple item by the many is becoming a well-documented fact. In his social history of Paris under Louis XIV, Leon Bernard tells us that the city's artisans subsisted black bread and and that the working class largely lived on the edge of starvation [2]. One hundred years later, at the time of the French Revolution, the artisans of Paris were still obviously meatless. According to Jeffrey Kaplow, their diet was now primarily soup and bread, along with water [3]. Rural elements were likewise poorly off, most of them rarely consuming meat or other sources of protein. Speaking of the Irish peasantry in the 1690s, Sir William Petty commented, As for flesh, they seldom eat it [4]. Other observers of the time, including the famous English student of dietetics, Dr. William Stark, knew that the masses were grain eaters and starved for other foods. Writing in 1788, Stark remarked, I learned that many of the poor people near Inverness [Scotland] never took any kind of animal food, not even eggs, cheese, butter or milk [5]. When the grain crop failed, as did in the late 1780s in France, the results, in the words of

A Review of Caribbean Political Economy

By the early fifteenth century, a new socioeconomic system already was evidently emerging in Western Europe. The system was capitalism at its commercial or mercantile stage. The main thrust of this new system of socioeconomic organization was the production of commodities for sale at home and abroad in the hope of making a profit. Trade was primarily concentrated in the cities of Western Europe, and its structure was the exchange of food and raw materials produced in the more backward parts of Europe for the products of the city artisans and imported products from the Near and Far East. The main dynamic of the West European economies came from the commercial activities of the merchants and bankers in the cities. By their activities the merchants and bankers created a system of regional trade that tied together the various regions of Europe, the Islamic world, and the Far East. In its regional trade, Europe ran a chronic trade deficit with the Eastern countries largely because it had no export that was greatly desired in the East while the exotic products and textiles of the East were much in demand by the feudal classes of Europe. To service its balance of trade deficit, Europe was forced to export gold and silver to the East. Since gold and silver were the basis of the monetary system of Europe at this time, the exportation of the precious metals to the East threatened to retard trade at home and abroad, and this threat led Europe to search