Some Rhetorical Strategies in Later Nineteenth-Century Laboring-Class Poetry

Abstract

In his pioneering presentation of Victorian self-taught poets and poetry, The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Brian Maidment organizes his material into three principal areas: "Chartists and Radicals," "The Parnassians," and "Lowly Bards and them. Some of these import "Parnassian" and political writing into "homely" poems, or use dialect forms and local materials to comment on social and cultural issues.They tend to represent communities in serious rather than sentimentalized ways and 1900, and well over half of these were writing in the second half of the nineteenth century. 3 Clearly there were many hundreds of laboring-class poets seeking effective modes of writing and print outlets for poetry in this period. In this essay I shall examine a number of examples of their poetical output, and consider some of the literary strategies these poets adopted and critical issues these strategies raise.In the scholarly "recovery" of hidden or lost traditions like laboring-class poetry, the issue of quality is not any the less important for having the potential to be

Joseph Skipsey, the ‘peasant poet’, and an unpublished letter from W. B. Yeats

“…5 Keegan's essay, which provides an excellent survey of how miners were represented in literature prior to the twentieth century, concentrates on poetry written by two lead miners, Thomas Blackah (1828-95) and Richard Watson (1833-91), and aims to re-energise the process of bringing literature written by miners to the surface. 6 My article is part of that process.…”

Poetry and Fin de Siècle Socialism

“…And yet very little work has been done on socialism's labouring‐class poets, though the class politics of the early socialist movement is frequently discussed. Partly, as John Goodridge suggests in ‘Some Rhetorical Strategies in Later Nineteenth‐Century Laboring‐Class Poetry,’ this may be due to conditioned prejudice against literary forms that labouring‐class poets often used, such as melodrama and sentimental verse. These forms, however, could evince powerful social protest and the recognition of their performativity and inventiveness ‘invites a richer critical response’ (544).…”