"Every Man Who Is Hanged Leaves a Poem": Criminal Poets in Victorian Street Ballads

O'Brien, Ellen L.

doi:10.1353/vp.2001.0015

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…8 In addition to Mike Sanders' aforementioned study of the shifting aesthetic and political registers of Chartist poetry, the collection includes Ellen O'Brien's examination of the ambiguous tonalities of populist resentment in execution ballads, Stephanie Kuduk's comparison of Purgatory of Suicides with the defiant speech which led to Cooper's imprisonment, Kelly Mays's study of Chartist poets' views of race, "wage slavery," and black chattel slavery, and Larry McCauley's examination of the interrelations between dialect poetry, regional solidarity, and claims for a national working-class identity. 9 The special issue also includes references to a supplementary website of recordings of Scottish and English working-class poems, read by Clare Hodgkinson and members of the Edwin Waugh Society.…”

Section: Recoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Class and Victorian Poetics

Boos

2005

Literature Compass

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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 -

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Section: Recoverymentioning

confidence: 99%