Working-class Poetry Research Articles

The Unaccompanied: Poetic Expressions of the Working Classes in England

Since the lost labour struggles of the mid-1980s, (working-class) poets like Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage have progressively asserted their themes across the social strata. Hence, four of their poems are put to closer scrutiny. Especially Armitage’s verse mirrors a tendency in contemporary working-class poetry – frequently located in the North and the Midlands – to reflect on endangered traditions, with no small amount of nostalgia. Yet, its issues – solidarity, equality and historical consciousness – have also been taken up by black and female lyricists. Consequently, the poetry of the new working classes includes the concerns of all disadvantaged people of England (and the world).

Stig Sjödin och minnets politik

The aim of this article is to analyse the attitudes to history and memory expressed in the working-class poetry of Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) – both in Sotfratgment (Fragments of Soot) from 1949, which marked his breakthrough as a poet, and in the poetry he wrote for the labour movement (mainly poems published in tradeunion membership magazines or read at meetings and congresses) – and to discuss how he and his poetry are today viewed as reminders of political ideals and experiences threatened by oblivion. There are certain differences between how memory and remembering is treated in Sotfragment and in Sjödin’s labour-movement poetry respectively. In Sotfragment, focus is more often on individual memories and existential problems, whereas in the labour-movement poetry, Sjödin is sometimes more explicitly political and writes about collective memories from a proletarian perspective. These differences are conditioned by differences between the spheres to which the poems belong: that of literature and that of the labour movement. In connection with the rise of left-wing radicalism in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s, Sjödin argued that older working-class literature contained important political experiences and perspectives. This is also how his works are sometimes viewed today, both by working-class writers and by political commentators. Thereby, it is emphasized that literature is not a passive medium for the preservation of memories, but that it can also transform them and make them politically relevant.

Addressing the Machine: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and Industrial Machinery

Abstract This article explores the representation of machinery by industrial workers in the Victorian period, and argues that their writings have a qualitatively different literary approach to machinery than that found in the work of established Victorian authors. It uses little-known poems by Scottish and Northern working-class writers to investigate how they use language and form to reflect upon the place of machinery in their working lives.

Volume 5 Issue 3: Editorial, Special Working-Class Poetry Issue

Volume 5 Issue 3: Editorial, Special Working-Class Poetry Issue

Arbetarpoesin och offentligheterna

Working-Class Poetry and Publics: The Example of Stig Sjödin
 The Swedish poet Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) is generally recognized as an important figure in both Swedish literary history and thehistory of Swedish working-class literature. This status rests almost exclusively on poetry collections published in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s. In addition to this, however, Sjödin was also active as a poet within the labour movement. By including his politicalinvolvement in the discussion of his poetry collections, this article aims at broadening the understanding of Sjödin’s oeuvre. It also argues that research on modern Swedish workingclass literature must transcend the traditional realm of literature.

Charles Kingsley’s Anthropology of the Generations

In 1852, Charles Kingsley (1819-75) declared his wish to ‘put the anthropology of men of my own generation on as sound a footing as I can,’ so that they would have clear religious and moral principles with which to face the challenges ahead of them. He expresses a strong sense of belonging to a significant generation, both in terms of his family, school and Cambridge contemporaries, as well as the Christian Socialists with whom he formed a lifelong association. This chapter will argue that, having lived through the historical turning points of the Bristol Riots of 1831 and the Chartist campaigns, Kingsley drew on generational models and a vocabulary of generational shared identity to delineate the moral seriousness of the times in which he lived. Karl Mannheim’s ‘The Problem with Generations’ (1927), which theorizes the challenges of demonstrating that people born around the same time necessarily share similar values, contextualizes discussion of Kingsley’s lifelong fascination with a common experience of social change and moral and spiritual awakening. Beginning with an overview of Kingsley’s personal circumstances, the chapter will demonstrate how a generational model helped him articulate his disappointment with the working-class poetry that followed Burns’s authentic recording of what he called the ‘heart experiences of his generation.’ Discussion will then turn to Kingsley’s fiction, especially Lancelot Smith’s earnest wrestling with his sense of moral responsibility, in Yeast (1848/1851) and the growing urgency for social reform, echoed by the heroes of Alton Locke (1850) and Two Years Ago (1857). While Kingsley’s heroes see themselves as morally superior to the previous generation, with a responsibility to compensate for the shortcomings of their predecessors, he also indicates that this is likely to emerge as a jumbled self-regeneration, both of individuals and societies, in the face of continuing challenges.

‘Ping Ping Ping / I break things’: Productive Disruption in the WorkingClass Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman

This essay explores how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of three American women poets, Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. It discusses how the poets’ working-class backgrounds affect their poetics and their perceptions of poetic craft. Through analysis, I show how their poetry shares a sense of defiant resistance, communicated through imagery of violence, labor, and sexual pleasure, responding to societal and institutional limitations placed on working-class women and working-class women writers.

Iimbongi of the resistance: praise poets, trade unions and extractive capitalism in apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTThe South African labour movement of the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by the rise of a new working class poetry. Drawing on traditional literary forms, the ‘worker poets’ became a prominent voice of anti-apartheid and anti-capitalist resistance. Performed during union meetings and community gatherings, their poems encoded the experiences of black labourers and gave voice to their struggles. As union membership surged throughout the 1980s, oral poets played a pivotal role in representing an invisible working class, advancing common notions of democracy, galvanising labourers into action and promoting social cohesion in the pursuit of a common cause. In challenging the extractive theft inflicted on their communities and environments, the worker poets exemplify a version of African environmentalism that recognises the constitutive ties between capital, labour and landscape, resisting not only the exploitation of African labour under the apartheid regime but also the environmental injustice that this subjugation represented.

‘Come all you Wild and Wicked Youths’: Representations of Young Male Convicts in Nineteenth-Century English Broadsides

AbstractRecent investigations into nineteenth-century juvenile delinquency have tended to focus on how the image of the delinquent was represented through the judicial process and the language of institutional reform. The argument has been that the delinquent was an antithetical creation of middle-class views about childhood, family, criminality, and punishment. What has been overlooked in the discussion is how working-class audiences represented young men who committed crimes. Broadside ballads, a form of working-class street poetry, are unique in that they create representations of youthful criminality from within the community whence young convicts originated. This article looks at four different types of broadside ballads: valedictory, betrayal, confessional, and satirical ballads that offer fresh and unique ways of understanding youthful criminality, convictism, and penal transportation within working-class culture.

Literature of the Global Working Class: Guest Editor's Introduction

November–December 2013 • 35 W hen I began my PhD studies and told my advisor I would write my dissertation on contemporary American working-class women’s poetry, her response was, “Is there such a thing?” I do not tell this story to criticize my advisor—I heard the same question from almost everyone I discussed it with: writers , professors, readers. However, I knew that my own poetry was firmly grounded in the working class—before I started college as a thirty-sevenyear -old single mother (and the first woman in my direct line to complete high school), I had held many common women’s working-class jobs of the period: waitress, bartender, nurse’s aide, telephone solicitor. I wrote poems in my head while changing beds at nursing homes and mixing drinks, then sketched them down later when I had time. My mother, too, working class all her life, wrote poems; after she died, I found boxes of her poetry in a closet. And I knew I had read published poetry and fiction and creative nonfiction that spoke to me as a working-class person, of the structures of feeling found among the working classes, of work itself, of working-class humor, and, often, of the despair and danger that attends working-class life. The point is, working-class writing is out there, everywhere—the difficulty is that it’s not often recognized. I hope that this working-class writing issue of World Literature Today serves you, our readers , as an introduction to the enormous range of contemporary, worldwide, working-class writing . From Ireland, Michael Pierse brings us the writings of Paula Meehan, Martin Lynch, and Dermot Bolger, arguing that they are successors to the rich tradition of Irish working-class writing . Australian Sarah Attfield shares her own poetry, poetry by an indigenous Australian, and a working-class rap. Karen Kovacik interviews Ewa Parma, from Poland; we also include poems by Parma. Wendell Ricketts has translated two excerpts from contemporary Italian working-class novels; one, Michela Murgia’s “The World Must Be Told” is included in the print edition, and the other, Peppe Fiore’s “Anyone Can Be Replaced” can be found in our web exclusives. Englishman Alan Morrison contributed the poem “Twigworth Yews,” and Chinese worker-poet Zheng Xiaoqiong is represented by her poem “Blue.” American Kat Meads shares an excerpt from her new collection of essays, 2:12 a.m. Qalandar Bux Memon and Zeeshan Yousaf report on working-class poets of the Punjab region in an article that includes a translated poem by Arif Shah Parohna. In addition to the excellent writing in the print issue, you’ll find more working-class writing in this issue’s web exclusives: a YouTube video of Punjabi poet Arif Shah Parohna performing one of his poems; a sheaf of contemporary American working-class poetry; a second poem by Alan Morrison; a poem by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Barakat; Eun-Gwi Chung’s article introducing us to working-class poets of Korea; and links to more poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong. Finally, I hope you’ll check out “Publishing and Presenting American Working-class Literatures,” an article with live links to journals and presses that feature workingclass writing. I hope that you enjoy your excursion into working-class writing and that you will share your copy of WLT with those who ask, “But is there such a thing as working-class writing?” Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (www.tonguetiedwoman.com) is a scholar, poet, and prose writer who completed her PhD in American working-class literature at the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Mish’s 2009 poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible, won the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Oklahoma Book Award. She is director of and a faculty mentor for the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA at Oklahoma City University. Literature of the Global Working Class Guest Editor’s Introduction Jeanetta Calhoun Mish ...

Australian Working-Class Writing

Australian working-class poetry is as diverse as the working class and offers the reader great insight into working-class life, revealing much about the intersection of class, gender, and race.

Ecocriticism and Eighteenth-Century English Studies

Although many ecocritical works written by Romanticists and others have neglected the importance of 18th-century English literature in the development of environmental concern, more recent ecocritical work has begun to pay closer and more sympathetic attention to writers from the end of the 17th century through the 1780s. New approaches to 18th-century poetry have emphasized an appreciation of natural beauty and fragility as well as utility, and a critical recognition of the distinction between georgic and pastoral views has begun to highlight nature as a working world (georgic) rather than an archaic refuge. Appropriately, studies of working-class poetry have now entered the field, and ecofeminism has begun to play a significant role in some recent revaluations. Postcolonial ecocriticism promises fuller development. A richer range of ecocritical readings of 18th-century texts should begin to lead not only to reassessments of individual works or authors but of the history of environmental consciousness.

Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics

is impossible for the truly generous mind to understand the small envyings that surround the daily path of an author, particularly a female one. Mary Hutton, Preface to Cottage Tales and Poems (1836) What do we know about the working-class women who wrote poetry the Victorian period? As so often happens in the study of non-canonical writers, their biographies exist in fragments, a miscellany of facts with very little cohesion. We may know that a writer was a factory girl or a domestic servant; however, we often know little of the circumstances in which she wrote, her family history, or the particularities of her work. It seems that the lack of extant working-class women's poetry lies in the historical (de)valuations surrounding their lives; the difficulties in recovering their texts is, in part, linked to the unavailability of biographical information. Perhaps deemed too unimportant by the establishment for a record of their lives to be kept, nineteenth-century working-class women poets all but disappeared from historical record, and we are only now in the process of rediscovering them. While male working-class poets have enjoyed a rebirth with the work of Michael Sanders, Ian Haywood, and Roy Vickers, (1) the study of working-class women writers is still in its nascent stages. Mary Hutton is one such writer who has been neglected until now in scholarship on working-class poetry. Hutton's rediscovery was first recorded in Ian Haywood's The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction, in which Haywood names Hutton the only author of Chartist Fiction. (2) Recently, John Goodridge's Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1800-1900 (3) collected five of Hutton's poems, and Patricia Johnson gives a passing nod to Hutton in her study of the development of Ethel Carnie's Feminist Vision. (4) Florence Boos, whose work has reinvigorated the study of working-class verse, mentions Hutton in Class and Victorian Poetics and has done much to illuminate the possibilities within working-class women's writing. In her study of the resonances of working-class women writers, she works to belie critical assumptions that Victorian women's preoccupations with religion vitiated their verse. (5) Following the recuperative momentum of Boos's paper, I argue for Hutton's important role in the formation of a working-class political discourse in Victorian poetry. This study of Hutton's poetical negotiations of politics and class seeks to enrich the present initial discussion of a new discourse of poetic politics: that of the working-class woman of the 1830s and 1840s. In order to understand the politics underpinning Mary Hutton's poetry, we must attend to the ways in which her poems enter into the political discourses of the early 1830s--namely, issues surrounding the New Poor Law, poverty, and slavery. Boos has pointed out that most Victorian working-class women poets had little direct access to the Chartist movement and its cultural institutions (Boos, 'Nurs'd Up,' p. 153). Despite this fact, Hutton's poems on the Poor Law and poverty are strikingly aligned with the poetry of the Chartist movement in both her appropriations of images of slavery and her use of discourses on human rights and freedom. (6) In this paper I wish to show how Hutton engages with nineteenth-century class politics and how her use of simple diction and her engagement with themes that resonate with Chartist poetry earns her a place as a de facto Chartist poet in the canon of nineteenth-century working-class literature. What little we know of Hutton's life and work, we learn from two contemporary middle-class male sources. The first is William Cartright Newsam's The Poets of Yorkshire: Comprising Sketches of the Lives, and Specimens of the Writings of those 'Children of Song' who have been Natives of, or otherwise connected with the County of York (1845), and the second is the preface to Hutton's first work, Sheffield Manor and Other Poems (1831), written by John Holland. …

Poets in the Iron-Mills

“Thirty years ago a historian would have been laughed out of the profession for proposing a study of song-poetry” (7), historian Clark D. Halker remarks in his assessment of postbellum working-class poetry and song, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95 (1991). The pages that follow consider Halker's own book retrospectively, arguing for its renewed interest. Although published after the inauguration of the canon wars and, in theory, already potentially pertinent to Americanist literary scholars, especially those exploring issues of class, For Democracy, Workers, and God was reviewed in journals of history, folklore, and music but did not cross the disciplinary boundary into American literature studies. The subfield of American literature to which it was of most pressing relevance—postbellum poetry—remained chronically neglected at that time, a situation that has since begun to change. Indeed, postbellum poetry had long been treated as a generic twilight zone, a “changless glimmer of dead gray” (434),1 as Edwin Arlington Robinson had put it, partially illuminated by the late innovations of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and, eventually, Robinson and perhaps Stephen Crane. Anthologist E. C. Stedman's somber assessment of the poetic era as a “twilight interval” in 1900 became a conventional opinion (xxviii). When Roy Harvey Pearce proposed in 1961 that the latter part of the nineteenth century was “the seeming break in the continuity of American poetry,” rescued only by Robinson (256), he thus reiterated a familiar narrative about an allegedly anemic era. In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite this poetic history, creating a newly fertile climate that warrants a fresh engagement with Halker's research.

The New West in Contemporary Western Working-Class Poetry: 1990–2005

The New West in Contemporary Western Working-Class Poetry: 1990–2005

Swinburne's Spasms: 'Poems and Ballads' and the 'Spasmodic School'

This article explores Swinburne's relation to the 'spasmodic school' of the 1850s, arguing that spasmodic poetry constituted an important influence on "Poems and Ballads." This influence is particularly apparent in a shared interest in the body and its impulses, significant with regard to both form and content. Swinburne's early letters and a parodic review he wrote as an undergraduate indicate an engagement with spasmodic verse which is reflected in the language and themes of his first volume. More broadly, associating Swinburne with spasmodism suggests ways in which he can be read in relation to the popular working-class poetry of his day.

Swinburne's Spasms: 'Poems and Ballads' and the 'Spasmodic School'

This article explores Swinburne's relation to the 'spasmodic school' of the 1850s, arguing that spasmodic poetry constituted an important influence on Poems and Ballads. This influence is particularly apparent in a shared interest in the body and its impulses, significant with regard to both form and content. Swinburne's early letters and a parodic review he wrote as an undergraduate indicate an engagement with spasmodic verse which is reflected in the language and themes of his first volume. More broadly, associating Swinburne with spasmodism suggests ways in which he can be read in relation to the popular working-class poetry of his day. ********** From its publication in 1866 onwards, critical response to Swinburne's first volume, Poems and Ballads, can be summed up by Rikky Rooksby's comment that: 'not only did it strike Victorian poetry with the force of a tidal wave; it sent ripples of sexual and religious rebellion far and wide'. (1) The purpose of this article is not to deny the novelty and force of Swinburne's collection, but to suggest that by recovering a literary and cultural context in which Swinburne could be read as a 'spasmodic' poet--the successor to a group of young poets who enjoyed intense but brief popularity in the 1850s--we can see that certain aspects of Poems and Ballads would have seemed strangely familiar to a contemporary audience. Swinburne's engagement with a literary movement which is gradually being recovered as one of the key poetic developments of the 1850s has been recently noted, but never extensively discussed. (2) It may seem surprising that he could have perceived himself (and been perceived) not solely as the heir of Keats and Shelley, or Gautier and Baudelaire, but as the successor to a school of poets whose fame was short-lived and who seemed so distant from him in terms of class, background, religion, and education. Yet reading Swinburne in relation to spasmodism can intensify our sense of him as a radical poet, besides showing how many of the concerns of his 1860s poems were highly contemporary. His early interest in spasmodic poetry, I argue, meant that even if he developed more profound influences later, he built upon spasmodic principles in his first published collection. The 'spasmodic school' consisted of a loosely affiliated group of poets, largely from working-class or lower middle-class dissenting backgrounds, who were linked by critics because of their penchant for lengthy subepic poems, often featuring a tormented poet-hero and with a focus on unusual imagery, extremes of emotion, insanity, violence, and sexual desire. As a literary phenomenon, spasmodism was primarily active from the late 1840s throughout the 1850s, and included poets such as Philip Bailey, Sydney Dobell, J. Westland Marston, and J. Stanyan Bigg, among others. The most notable example of a spasmodic poem, Alexander Smith's A Life-Drama, was published in 1853 and caused a literary sensation: among other accolades, Arthur Hugh Clough compared it favourably to Matthew Arnold's poems, Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it 'wonderful', and George Meredith (whose work Swinburne later championed) wrote a sonnet in appreciation of Smith for The Critic. (3) Spasmodism quickly left its mark upon (or at the least was read into) other major works of the decade, including those which Swinburne most admired as a young man--Arnold's Empedocles on Etna, Tennyson's Maud, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. It was also a term applied to Robert Browning's works, particularly Sordello (another poem Swinburne worshipped as a young man) and Paracelsus. The standard twentieth-century view has been that spasmodism was a passing literary fad, whose credibility was fatally damaged by the publication of W. E. Aytoun's parody of the genre, Firmilian, in 1854. (4) But while it is true that Aytoun made it difficult for spasmodic poetry to be taken seriously, and by the 1860s the leading spasmodic poets had generally renounced their early works, changed their methods, or ceased to publish, it is also evident that spasmodism had already penetrated further into the literary consciousness than might have been previously thought and lingered far after its alleged demise and disappearance from the literary scene. …

Finding Her Voice(s): The Development of a Working-Class Feminist Vision in Ethel Carnie's Poetry

The effort to recover and reevaluate British working-class women's writing is still in its early stages. One writer who certainly deserves such attention is Ethel Carnie (1886-1962), first British working-class woman to sustain a long and varied publishing career. This essay will focus on Carnie's earliest publications, three volumes of poetry that appeared between 1907 and 1914, and interpret their themes and developments against backgrounds of both nineteenth-century working-class poetry and early twentieth-century labor unrest and women's suffrage agitation. (1) Carnie's poetic growth across seven years between 1907 and 1914 is striking. Although she began writing as a factory girl supported by middle-class mentors, her first volume, Rhymes from Factory (1907 and 1908), barely touches on realities of working-class life and is largely unmarked by class consciousness or feminist concerns, focusing more on imitations of Romantic odes to Nature and filled with impressive allusions to Greek and Roman classics. Gradually, however, Carnie's poetry begins to reflect both context she writes in and influence of earlier working-class poets. When her poetry reaches maturity in her 1914 volume, Voices of Womanhood, Carnie moves from ignoring her working-class background to embracing it with detailed poems dramatizing working-class women's lives as well as poems that critique ideals of art that ignore its basis in class distinctions. Like Ernest Jones and other Chartist poets, Carnie's later poems often employ a collective voice, and, like such working-class predecessors as Scottish poet Janet Hamilton, she writes with a particular awareness of issues that face working-class women. But Carnie does not merely place herself in working-class poetic tradition; she revises that tradition through her strongly feminist interpretations of traditional working-class metaphors such as slavery and motherhood that tended to align women with political passivity or, at most, allowed them virtue of endurance. In fact, I would argue that Carnie's Voices of Womanhood is unique in its careful rereading of place of working-class women and their importance to working-class politics as a whole. Carnie is distinctive in her emphatic stress on women's liberation as a necessary component of working-class and human liberation. In Voices, her dramatic monologues bring a remarkable range of working-class women's voices into play, voices which resonate with words of their foremothers and fathers and yet also strike out on their own, inspired by women's suffrage and union movements. Further, her collective voices are gender-egalitarian, and, in concert with her socialist background, offer images of a transformed artistic practice that challenges past traditions' reliance on gender stereotypes or class exploitation. 1 As a British working-class woman writer, Ethel Carnie had a unique career, both in terms of its length and its variety. Between 1907 and 1936, Carnie produced three books of poetry, eleven novels--one of which, Helen of Four Gates, was made into a silent film--four books of children's fairy tales, and one novella, in addition to numerous short stories and journalistic pieces. She also edited weekly newspaper, The Woman Worker, for nearly a year. (2) In 1913, Ethel Smyth, composer of suffrage anthem, March of Women, set two of Carnie's poems--Possession and Song of Road--to music, dedicating them to suffrage leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Thus, while a website on Smyth now refers to the completely forgotten Ethel Carnie, (3) during first decades of twentieth century Carnie's work attracted considerable attention. Carnie's work is also significant because of her background and political affiliations. Born in 1886, daughter of two cotton-mill weavers, she began half-time work in mill at age eleven and left school for full-time work as a winder at thirteen. …

Class and Victorian Poetics

AbstractIn this essay, I consider three aspects of recent studies of working‐class class poetry: the tasks and rewards of its recovery, the complexities of critical attempts to interpret “non‐canonical” verse, and wider insights which have emerged from efforts to integrate such attempts into more traditional studies of nineteenth‐century literature. Recovery has been necessary because most working‐class poets could only hope to publish their work in broadside or periodical form, and few of their works have been reprinted. Accidents of preservation have further foreshortened our understanding of the range of working‐class poetry, which extended from Thomas Cooper's dignified epic verse to Isobel Chisholm's gypsy “curses” and Mary McPherson's Gaelic incantations. Interpretative studies of the range just mentioned have benefited from willingness to consider unfamiliar rhetorical models; search out historical antecedents of “simple” appeals to direct emotion; and admit that there might be more to poetry than has been dreamt of in our received interpretations and well‐worn critical commonplaces. Finally, integration of an appreciation of working‐class poetry into studies of Victorian literature reveals that much of the history of mid‐century poetry – reflected through lenses of “class”– may be read as an attempt to barricade middle‐class canons of taste against the inroads of working class artistry. More critical studies of that artistry might therefore help dismantle these barricades, and restore to all the period's poets a measure of the respect and attention they deserve. They might also help answer some intriguing generic as well as historical questions. Among these are: Why were poetry and personal memoirs the period's principal working‐class genres? And why did the role of working‐class poetry seem to recede as the century waned, even as universal working‐class literacy advanced?

The "Homely Muse" in Her Diurnal Setting: The Periodical Poems of "Marie," Janet Hamilton, and Fanny Forrester

CRITICAL ATTENTION TO WORKING-CLASS POETRY AS GENRE HAS SUFFered for many years from a tendency to ignore these works' original publication-history. [1] It is easy to comment once again on the stereotypical qualities of a few readily accessible volumes of verse, but difficult to canvass thousands of unindexed pages of long-expired and barely extant periodicals, search of working-class poets' original audiences, contexts, and modes of expression. [2] Most working-class poets sent their work to local newspapers or journals, and many saw their poems in print penny-newspapers and journals. Few seriously hoped to see them hard covers, despite the support of a few sympathetic editors of working-class periodicals, but the sheer volume and variety of work they did publish belied facile views of these editors as instruments of Foucauldian repression. Several working class periodical poets developed distinctive voices and identities that were cherished by their peers, and articulated ideals and grievances that were personal as well as the deepest senses of the words. Such successes were especially ephemeral and precarious for women, whose poems sometimes gave meanings Patrick Joyce may not have intended to his remark that working-class poetry not about work, but about the getting of dignity through the realisation of a common humanity (p. 28). Most editors of reformist journals could be expected to see merit cases for hard cover publication of working-men's poetry, [3] but most provided fewer and less detailed descriptions of women contributors, and conscious and unconscious sexism tacitly biased the reception and publication of poor women's work. Coincidentally, more workingclass women than men also signed their poems generic or truncated forms (Marie, Adeline, Racla, or A Ploughman's Wife). Some editors, finally, did hold fixed and arbitrary views about the length and complexity of publishable periodical poetry (as opposed to essays and fiction), and these views seemed to proliferate and harden as the century waned. model instance of the earlier alliance between poetry and political ideals might be found Alexander Campbell's active editorial support the 1860s for Ellen Johnston's efforts to develop her poetic persona as Factory Girl, which Judith Rosen has reexamined this collection. [4] An elderly radical, Campbell encouraged Johnston's submissions, sought responses to them from her fellow-poets, and organized subscription campaigns which paid for the two editions of her Autobiography, Songs, and Poems at the end of her brief poetic career. [5] Fewer and fewer editors were able or willing to make such gestures the decades that followed, however, and the temporal undertow was so strong and steady that it suggested poetry itself--time-honored bearer of political ideals the work of Burns, Shelley, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Elliot, and others--might have begun to move away from its populist origins by the end of the century, even as social attitudes and universal elementary education broadened literary magazines' evolving mass-circulation, and impoverished writers began to turn their attention and hopes for publication to essays and serial fiction. In the present essay, I will sketch the life-trajectories and publication histories of three other working-class women poets: (1) Marie, whose work appeared the London People's Journal from 1846 to 1850; (2) Janet Hamilton, a Scottish poet whose essays appeared Cassell's The Working-Man's Friend and its supplements from 1850-1853; and (3) Fanny Forrester, who published sixty-odd poems Ben Brierley's Journal between 1870 and 1876. Along the way, I will also try to elicit some conclusions about the ranges of support working-class women could hope to find the darkling plain of Victorian poetry. The People's Journal described Marie 1846 as a factory dye-worker from Chorley, and she published over this abbreviated signature thirty-five poems and an essay between 1846 and 1852. …