A History of British Working Class Literature

John Goodridge has been researching labouring-class poetry, John Clare studies and related fields for the past three decades. He is Vice-President of the John Clare Society and a Fellow of the English Association. He co-founded the Robert Bloomfield Society and the Thomas Chatterton Society, edits the Database of Labouring-Class Poets and is the General Editor of six volumes of labouring-class poetry. Bridget Keegan has worked on British labouring-class poetry for nearly thirty years and has written and edited numerous publications on the topic. She is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Creighton University, Omaha.

• Introduction John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan; 1. When 'Bread depends on her Character': the problem of laboring-class subjectivity in the foundling hospital archive Jennie Batchelor; 2. 'Stirr' d up by Emulation of the famous Mr Duck': laboring-class poetry in the 1730s Jennifer Batt; 3. The Verse Epistle and laboring-class literary sociability from Duck to Burns William J. Christmas; 4. 'But Genius is the special Gift of God!': the reclamation of 'Natural Genius' in the late eighteenth-century verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse Steve Van-Hagen; 5. Alexander Wilson: the rise and fall and rise of a laboring-class writer Gerard Carruthers; 6. Neither mute nor inglorious: Ann Yearsley and Elegy Kerri Andrews; 7. 'British Bards': the concept of laboring-class poetry in eighteenth-century Wales Mary-Ann Constantine; 8. 'Behold in these Coromantees/the fate of an agonized world': Edward Rushton's transnational radicalism Franca Dellarosa; 9. Transnational Ulster and laboring-class self-fashioning Jennifer Orr; 10. Working-class poetry and the Royal Literary Fund: two case studies in patronage Scott McEathron; 11. The life of William Cobbett: caricature, hauntology and the impossibility of radical life writing in the romantic period Ian Haywood; 12. John Clare's Agrarian Idyll: a confluence of pastoral and Georgic Gary Harrison; 13. 'And aft thy dear Doric aside I hae flung, to busk oot my sang wi' the prood Southron tongue': the Antiphonal Muse in Janet Hamilton's poetics Kaye Kossick; 14. 'The guilty game of human subjugation': religion as ideology in Thomas Cooper's The Purgatory of Suicides Mike Sanders; 15. At the margins of print: life-narratives of Victorian working-class women Florence S. Boos; 16. The newspaper press and the Victorian working-class poet Kirstie Blair; 17. Tensions, transformations and local identity: the evolving meanings of nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect songs Rod Hermeston; 18. On the road: all manner of tramps in English and Scottish writing from the 1880s to the 1920s H. Gustav Klaus; 19. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: genre, serial fiction and popular reading patterns Nicola Wilson; 20. 'The young men of the nation': Alexander Baron and urban working-class masculinity Anthony Cartwright; 21. Kathleen Dayus: the girl from Hockley Sharon Ouditt; 22. 'It have a kind of communal feeling with the Working Class and the spades': Sam Selvon, Tony Harrison and 'Colonization in Reverse' Jack Windle; 23. Clannish confines: the folk, the proletariat and the people in modern Scottish literature Corey Gibson; 24. A critical minefield: the haunting of the Welsh working-class novel Lisa Sheppard and Aidan Byrne; 25. Transforming working-class writers and writing: digital editions, projects and analyses Cole Crawford; Afterword Brian Maidment.

'A History of British Working Class Literature consists of 25 essays by more than 30 contributors hailing from the US, the UK, and Germany. This reviewer cannot imagine a more comprehensive commentary on this much-neglected topic. … This reviewer recommends every essay in this splendid collection, because singling out some is to implicitly and unfairly devalue others. … This collection is a must read for those interested in politics and literature. … Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' L. A. Brewer, Choice