In Britain, the period that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century marks the emergence of the working classes, alongside and in response to the development of the middle-class public sphere. This collection contributes to that scholarship by exploring the figure of the "working-class intellectual," who both assimilates the anti-authoritarian lexicon of the middle classes to create a new political and cultural identity, and revolutionizes it with the subversive energy of class hostility. Through considering a broad range of writings across key moments of working-class self-expression, the essays reevaluate a host of familiar writers such as Robert Burns, John Thelwall, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Ann Yearsley, and even Shakespeare, in terms of their role within a working-class constituency. The collection also breaks fresh ground in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship by shedding light on a number of unfamiliar and underrepresented figures, such as Alexander Somerville, Michael Faraday, and the singer Ned Corvan.

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.

A comprehensible and accessible portrait of the various 'languages' which shaped public life in nineteenth century Britain, covering key themes such as governance, statesmanship, patriotism, economics, religion, democracy, women's suffrage, Ireland and India.

Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience.

This book explores the complex and contested relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England by examining the life and work of Stephen Duck, the 'famous threshing poet'. Duck's remarkable story reveals the tolerances, and intolerances, of the Hanoverian social order.

For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, and social and economic mobility often influenced the way they defined and experienced their emotional lives. The Happiness of the British Working Class employs and analyzes over 350 autobiographies of individuals in England, Scotland, and Ireland to explore the sources of happiness of British working people born before 1870. Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

The proper organisation of rural communities was central to political and social debates at the turn of the eighteenth century, and featured strongly in the 1790s political polemic that influenced so many Romantic poets and novelists. This book investigates the representation of the rural village and country town in a range of Romantic texts.

A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.

This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.

This book takes a fresh look at the progressive interventions of writers in the nineteenth century. From Cobbett to Dickens and George Eliot, and including a host of lesser known figures – popular novelists, poets, journalists, political activists – writers shared a commitment to exploring the potential of literature as a medium in which to imagine new and better worlds. The essays in this volume ask how we should understand these interventions and what are their legacies in the twentieth and twenty first centuries? Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them. This timely book contributes to our appreciation of the radical traditions that underpin our literary past.