Rebellious Writing

Lauren Alex O’Hagan is a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff University who specialises in deviant inscriptive practices of the early twentieth century, particularly those concerning the working classes. She recently completed a PhD in Language and Communication with a thesis titled «Class, Culture and Conflict in the Edwardian Book Inscription: A Multimodal Ethnohistorical Approach». She has published extensively on literacy and scribal practices, consumption culture and social class in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

• Contents: Lauren Alex O’Hagan: Introduction: Ordinary Writing and Rebellion – Ordinary Writing as a Search for Institutional Agency – Cara Dobbing: Writing and Rebellion Among Pauper Patients in the Garlands Lunatic Asylum – Steven King/Carol Beardmore: Contesting the Workhouse: Life Writing, Children and the Later New Poor Law – Maureen Daly Goggin: ‹Bold Bad Ones› in Stitches: WSPU Suffragettes’ Embroidery Sewn in and about Holloway Prison, 1910–1912 – Ordinary Writing as a Challenge to the Social Order – Sarah MacDonald: ‹No Vote, No Census. As women are not persons in the eyes of the law, why count cyphers in the census?›: Exploring Rebellion in the 1911 Census – Sarah Wise: The Stolen Chapter: James Timewell’s Challenge to the Metropolitan Police – Lauren Alex O’Hagan: Rethinking the Book Inscription as a Site of Class Struggle – Ordinary Writing as a Tool of Sociopolitical Discontent – Fanny Louvier: Mastering Their Own Voice: Female Domestic Servants in Edwardian Britain – Daniel Renshaw: A Letter to the Editor, a Challenge to the Status Quo? Radical and Transgressive – Correspondence in the Anglo-Jewish Press, 1901–1914 – Ann Wilson: Picture Postcard Politics: The Expression of Dissent via Picture Postcards in Edwardian Ireland – Ordinary Writing as a Form of Creative Disobedience – Danell Jones: How the Extraordinary Becomes Ordinary: A. B. C. Merriman-Labor’s African Vision – Hadeel J. Azhar: ‹A fire to fill my heart – whose name I dare not speak›: Surpassing Conventional Heterosexuality in Dollie Radford’s Writing – Ken Lee and Jodie Matthews: Romani Rebel Writing: George ‹Lazzy› Smith’s Entrepreneurial Auto-Exoticism – Julia Gillen: Afterword.

«This bold, brave and genuinely interdisciplinary collection of essays reminds us that socialdisobedience was not only rife during the Edwardian period, but that it was endlessly, and powerfully,creative. Rebellious writing could be found in some extraordinary places. The value of theseso-called ‹ordinary› texts cannot be underestimated, as these essays prove again and again.» (Dr Samuel Shaw, Founder of the Edwardian Culture Network andTeaching Fellow in Nineteenth-Century Art, Leicester University)«The book offers a unique and innovative approach to the everyday literacies of marginalisedEdwardians and immerses the reader into their acts of rebellious writing. This comprehensiveand compelling collection of work promises to be a key resource for literacy scholars with aninterest in identity, conflict and social class and it will serve as an intoxicant for those who remaina rebel at heart.» (Dr Tereza Spilioti, Reader in Language and Communication, Cardiff University)