A_Database_of_British_and_Irish_Labourin.docx (2025)

A Catalogue of British and Irish Labouring-class and Self-taught Poets c. 1700-1900

This is the latest version of this descriptive listing of labouring-class and self-taught poets and poetry, over half a million words, giving bibliographical and biographical and critical information on 2,386 named poets.

Class and Victorian Poetics

Literature Compass, 2005

In 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 ?

Work and Education: The Case of Laboring Women Poets in England, Scotland, and Germany

Published in: Ellen Pollak, ed., A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. The essay outlines major philosophical shifts, during the Age of Enlightenment, towards women and work, and links them with economic developments at the same time. It offers an account of how labouring women writers of the age took up these issues, specifically through the portrayal of physical labour, poverty, and education in their works.

Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds., Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections. Indiana University Press, 1994

Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 1994

Book Review: Becoming a Poet in A.S. England; Peritia 26 (2015) 288-91.

Peritia, 2015

Through the Lens of Poetry and Intersectionality Uncovering Early Traces of Multiple Oppression in the Literary Works of Labouring-Class Women in the 18th Century.Mastori E

2024

This study explores the oppression faced by 18th-century labouring-class women through poetry and intersectionality. By employing Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality and Beverly Skeggs' theory of respectability it examines how gender and class intertwine to create unique challenges. Analysing the lives and works of non-canonized women poets, the research unveils enduring patterns of overlapping oppressions, highlighting the significance of intersectionality in understanding women's experiences. This study offers fresh insights into their struggles, contributing to both literary analysis and women's studies. Keywords Labouring class, intersectionality, respectability, oppression, gender inequalities. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1875320&dswid=-562

The muses of resistance: laboring-class women's poetry in Britain, 1739-1796

1990

In this original and challenging study. Donna Landry shows how an understand ing of ihe remarkable but neglected careers of laboring-class women poets in the eighteenth century provokes a reassessment of our ideas concern-ing the literature of the period. Poets such as the washerwoman ...

Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus, by Susanne Kord

The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 2009

Near the end of Susanne Kord's book, the "passively sentimental heroines" of such eighteenth-century novels as Pamela and Clarissa are suggestively deployed as boundary figures of "new" bourgeois femininity: in such novels, as in life, "women were clearly neither supposed to work (for money)," Kord claims, "nor were they supposed to produce culture (certainly not for money). Work itself," she concludes, "was redefined as a masculine occupation" (249-50). Throughout her study of women peasant poets in three separate and distinct locales, Kord argues that such a cultural shift in the perception of women's identity was dramatically conceived in reaction to a substantial body of laboring-class women's writing. The bulk of this writing took work itself as its object, representing the experiences of "the woman's labour" (to borrow Mary Collier's poetic title) in direct juxtaposition to men's work. Unlike the poetry of laboring-class males such as Stephen Duck or Robert Burns whose writing gained a measure of bourgeois approbation, the poetry of women peasant poets, according to Kord, was typically met with dismissive scorn and ad feminem attacks by middle-class critics. "Virtually all women peasant poets," Kord writes, "were famed for their ugliness" (139), a feature not lost by their critics or portraitists. Indeed, to the extent that their poetry was seriously considered by contemporary readers at all, it was perceived as a negative image of both women and Art: the book's chief task is to discover and argue the relevance of the "link ... between the reception of

Thomas Watson, Peasant-Poet: The Reading, Writing and Religion of a Cumbrian Dry-Stone Waller

Northern History, 2012

"Work" Poems: Assessing the Georgic Mode of Eighteenth-Century Working-Class Poetry.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.