Class and the canon : constructing labouring-class poetry and poetics, 1780-1900

229 Pages·2012·0.985 MB·English

by  Gorji, Mina, Blair, Kirstie

Class and the Canon
Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry
and Poetics, 1750-1900
Edited by
Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji
Class and the Canon
Also by Kirstie Blair
FORM AND FAITH IN VICTORIAN POETRY AND RELIGION
VICTORIAN POETRY AND THE CULTURE OF THE HEART
Also by Mina Gorji
JOHN CLARE AND THE PLACE OF POETRY
Class and the Canon
Constructing Labouring- Class Poetry
and Poetics, 1750–1900
Edited by
Kirstie Blair
University of Glasgow, UK
and
Mina Gorji
University of Cambridge, UK
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji 2013
Individual chapters © contributors 2013
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
Kirstie Blair
2 Was Burns a Labouring- Class Poet? 16
Nigel Leask
3 Constructing the Ulster Labouring- Class Poet:
The Case of Samuel Thomson 34
Jennifer Orr
4 Sociable or Solitary? John Clare, Robert Bloomfield,
Community and Isolation 55
John Goodridge
5 John Clare and the Triumph of Little Things 77
Mina Gorji
6 ‘No more than as an atom ’mid the vast profound’:
Conceptions of Time in the Poetry of William Cowper,
William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley 95
Kerri Andrews
7 The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle,
Ebenezer Elliott, and the ‘active poet’ 116
Marcus Waithe
8 Samuel Ferguson’s Maudlin Jumble 136
Matthew Campbell
9 Courtly Lays or Democratic Songs? The Politics
of Poetic Citation in Chartist Literary Criticism 156
Michael Sanders
10 Edwin Waugh: The Social and Literary Standing
of a W orking- Class Icon 174
Brian Hollingworth
v
vi Contents
11 William Barnes’s Place and Dialects of Connection 191
Sue Edney
Index 211
Acknowledgements
This collection received its initial impetus from a conference we
organized in 2008 on the theme of ‘Class and the Canon’, and the
lively discussions we had with participants on that day. We are grateful
to all the speakers and attendees for their inspiring work on l abouring-
class poetics, and to the British Association for Victorian Studies and
the University of Glasgow for funding this event. We would also like to
thank all the contributors to this volume for their patience and willing-
ness in revising their work, and the reader for Palgrave Macmillan for
their helpful suggestions for revision.
Kirstie completed the editing work and wrote the Introduction for
this collection while holding a visiting professorship, as Margaret
Root Brown Professor of Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at the
Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University. She is very grateful to
the ABL and Baylor for the research leave funding that supported these
tasks. She would also like to thank Matthew Creasy and Corinna Creasy
for providing childcare at a crucial moment.
Mina would like to thank John Beer, Heather Glen and Subha
Mukherjee for their incisive and helpful comments on her essay. She
is grateful to Sara Lodge for permission to quote from her forthcoming
article. She would also like to thank Zach Beer for helping her clarify
and shape her thoughts – and cheering and sustaining all the while.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Kerri Andrews is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, and
has previously taught at the Open University, Nottingham Trent
University and the University of Leeds. Her general research interests
are in e ighteenth-c entury literature, particularly labouring- class poetry,
women’s writing, and print culture of the Romantic period. She is the
editor of The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley (4 vols), forthcoming in
2013, and of the forthcoming monograph Ann Yearsley and Hannah
More, Patronage and Poetry: The Story of a Literary Relationship (2013).
She is secretary of the British Association for Romantic Studies, and a
member of the British Society for E ighteenth-C entury Studies and the
Robert Bloomfield Society.
Kirstie Blair is Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and has
published widely in the field of nineteenth- century poetry and poetics.
She is the author of Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006) and
Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012), and has edited and
co- edited collections on John Keble and on Tractarian poetry and poet-
ics. Her published work on l abouring- class poetry and poetics includes
an essay in Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), and a chapter on
‘Tennyson and the Victorian W orking- Class Poet’ in Tennyson Among the
Poets, ed. Seamus Perry and Robert D ouglas- Fairhurst (2009).
Matthew Campbell is Professor of English at the University of York.
His research falls into three main areas: Victorian poetry, n ineteenth-
century Irish poetry in English, and contemporary Irish poetry. In
1999 he published Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, and from
1999–2004 he was editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin. He also
co- edited Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914 (2000, with Jacqueline
M. Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth), and contributed a chapter on the
nineteenth-c entury funeral ode. He has published a series of articles
on nineteenth- century Irish poets, including Thomas Moore, William
Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, James Clarence Mangan, and W. B. Yeats.
A recent chapbook, Jeremiah Joseph Callanan and ‘The Last Home of the
Bards’ (2004) published a manuscript of Callanan’s ‘Gougane Barra’
(1826) which he discovered in the British Library. He wrote the chapter
on Victorian Irish Poetry in English for the Cambridge History of Irish
Literature (2006). He is currently finishing a major monograph, Irish
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Poetry in the Union, 1801–1899. In the field of contemporary poetry,
Professor Campbell edited and introduced The Cambridge Companion to
Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003).
Sue Edney lectures in English at Bath Spa University where she com-
pleted her PhD. Her research covers aspects of poetic language, especially
in constructions of place through dialect poetry of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Her published essays include ‘“Times be badish
vor the poor”: William Barnes and his dialect of disturbance in the
Dorset “Eclogues”’, English, 58 (2009): 206–29; ‘Printed Voices: Dialect
and Diversity in Mid-N ineteenth-C entury Lancashire’, Place, Writing,
and Voice in Oral History, ed. Shelley Trower (2011) and ‘Recent Studies
in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections’,
Literature Compass 8/9 (2011): 660–74.
John Goodridge is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University
and an eighteenth and n ineteenth- century specialist with particular
interests in ‘recovery’ research and labouring- class poetry. He has pub-
lished widely on pastoral and georgic, Romantic and l abouring- class
poets including Bloomfield, Clare, Mary Collier and John Dyer. He has
written two Cambridge monographs, Rural Life in E ighteenth- Century
English Poetry (1994) and John Clare and Community (2012) and is the
General Editor of two series of English L abouring- Class Poets (2003 and
2006). He is a V ice-P resident of the John Clare society and a Fellow of
the English Association.
Mina Gorji is a lecturer at Cambridge University and a Fellow of
Pembroke College where she works on eighteenth and nineteenth-
century poetry. Her published writing includes a monograph John Clare
and the Place of Poetry (2008) and essays on Robert Bloomfield in Lyric,
Class and the Romantic Canon, eds Simon White, John Goodridge and
Bridget Keegan (2006), and on William Hone’s popularization of writ-
ers such as Keats, Spenser and Clare in the early nineteenth century (in
Romanticism and Popular Culture, ed. Phillip Connell and Nigel Leask
(2008)). She has also edited a collection of essays Rude Britannia (2007)
which examines the forms and forces of rudeness in British culture.
Brian Hollingworth is a retired Head of Literature Studies at Derby
University and formerly a lecturer in Education at Leeds University. His
interests include vernacular language, its significance in education and
general culture, and its use in literature. His writing has covered the
development of English studies in nineteenth-century secondary and
primary education, and the use of the vernacular in Caribbean literature