Piston, Pen and Press

Kirstie Blair is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Chair in English Studies at the University of Stirling. She has published three interdisciplinary monographs on Victorian poetry and poetics, the last of which, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (2019), won the Saltire Society Research Book of the Year and overall Scottish Book of the Year awards. Over a 20+ year career in Victorian studies, she has published numerous articles, book chapters, edited two collections, and served on various editorial boards and boards of learned societies. She was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022, and invited to deliver the British Academy Warton Lecture in English Poetry in that year. Most of her publications in the last five years have centred on popular newspaper and periodical culture, and working-class poetry and poetics. Michael Sanders is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (2009), the co-editor (with Prof. David Matthews) of Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2021). Over a 20+ career in Victorian studies he has published; numerous articles across a range of refereed journals including, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, over a dozen book chapters, and edited the series Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (2001) and The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli Volume One: Vivian Grey (2004). Most of his publications have focused on the intersection between working-class literature and culture and radical politics in the nineteenth century. Oliver Betts is the Research Lead at the National Railway Museum in York. He is a historian of how technology, society, and culture intertwine in the long nineteenth-century, both in Britain and the wider Anglophone world. Above all, he is interested in how the experience of social class shaped, and was shaped by, the impact of technology. Over the last ten years he has published book chapters and articles on railway history, working-class society, museum studies, and the public history of the Victorian era, as well as being lead or contributing curator on numerous exhibitions and gallery redesigns.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Poetry Columns, Workplaces and Associations – The Contexts of Victorian Working-class Literary CultureKirstie Blair1. Associational Culture, Literary Pursuits and the Industrial WorkerKirstie Blair2. Readers and Audiences in Industrial CommunitiesKirstie Blair and Oliver Betts3. ‘[P]ieces…written amid the noise and confusion of a cotton mill’: Poetry, Associational Culture and Class Conflict in Ashton-under-Lyne from Luddism to LiberalismMike Sanders4. Mining Communities and Literary ProductionKirstie Blair and Mike Sanders5. Rough Weaving: Literary Production in the Textile DistrictsMike Sanders and Kirstie Blair6. Writing the Railway Revolution from the Footplate: Railway Workers’ Literature in ContextOliver BettsAfterword: Disturbing the Dust: Finding Places of (and for) Victorian and Edwardian Working-class WritingMike SandersBibliographyIndex