Introduction

The eighteen critical essays in the present volume were inspired directly or indirectly by the work of the late H. Gustav Klaus. The project emerged from thinking about the legacy of Professor Klaus, whose life and work are ably and affectionately summarised by his colleague from the University of Rostock, Christian Schmitt-Kilb, in the Foreword. This is not a formal Festschrift, however, of the traditional and pious sort, but rather a tribute in the sense of taking further the foundational work Klaus achieved as a teacher and scholar. He looked at literature, as Schmitt-Kilb says, ‘from the margins and from below’. We build specifically on two major, related strands of his research: working-class and radical writing. We also take in his interest in such areas as popular fiction, marginalised groupings, including itinerant workers, and the relationship between socialist and ecological thinking. But it is his insistence on the value of working-class writing, and an unshakeable belief in the ability of the people to change society, that gives his work its potency and inspired us to build on it here. These two main strands are not necessarily synchronous, of course: many significant radical writers come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds (some are discussed in these essays). Nor are working-class writers necessarily radical or even political in their writings, though they very often are; neither is the radicalism of their work always obvious. And although some of the most compelling writing comes where the strands coincide, we have not insisted on this in choosing subjects. Rather, we trace the progress of radical and working-class writing, side by side and intertwined, choosing authors, movements and topics that cast a wider light on both traditions, and especially the connections between them.

To explain our terms briefly, we use the term ‘working-class’ broadly to mean writers who had to work for a living, and thus had limited access to resources of educational, financial or cultural capital. Additionally, we use the term ‘labouring-class’ to specify the earlier period, 1700–1830, when a coherent, self-conscious working-class identity had yet to fully emerge. By ‘radical’ – from Latin radix, root, signalling change at the root – we mean writers who wished to change society, often in fundamental ways (Williams). Given the social and economic challenges faced by the writers we consider, this radicalism is most often directed at bringing about a better, more equal world; however, when in response to dramatic external transformation, radicalism might look rather more reactionary, and focus on defending the vitality of the world from forces that seem antithetical to human flourishing.

Radicalism takes many forms in the writers we study here. A critical grappling with the status quo seems to have been a major, if sometimes indirect or implicit, feature of working-class writing, ever since it broke through in the shape of Stephen Duck’s ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ in 1730. This poem challenged conventional pastoral and georgic ideas about the pleasant nature and nobility of rural labour, giving voice to feelings of alienation under profit-driven agrarian capitalism. Duck’s ability to speak through the decorous register of Augustan poetics, however, gained him admittance to the court of Queen Caroline, further destabilising the long-standing relationship between literature and social status. This drew vituperative attention to Duck from other poets and literary critics: shedding scorn on his transition from manual to mental labour, some suggested he would soon ‘thresh his brains’ out (quoted in Batt, p. 80). As William J. Christmas explains in our opening chapter, even the account of his unfortunate death (as suicide) reveals the endurance of this restrictive, classist ideology, which held that labouring-class poets should remain in their original occupations: to do otherwise risked losing the very thing that made their poetry special and, in connection, their psychological stability.

Not long after Duck was elevated to the royal court, a formidable challenge to his account of rural labour was presented by Mary Collier, in The Woman’s Labour (1739). Inspired by Duck’s model, but unhappy with his negative portrayal of women’s contribution to agricultural labour, Collier presented a sociable alternative to his competitive male view, powerfully describing the double shift of women’s work, burdened by domestic tasks and childcare, as well as cleaning for higher class women who outsourced this task to their inferiors. While Duck complains of work’s endlessness, replaying itself even in his sleep, Collier ripostes: ‘we have hardly ever Time to Dream’. Collier initiated an important female presence in labouring-class writing, even if her success at the time was undermined by her relative ‘outspokenness’ (Goodridge, 1995, p. 70). She may have influenced others, however, including Duck himself.¹ His later poem, ‘Avaro and Amanda’, expands on a short anecdote from The Spectator magazine, concerning a shipwrecked English merchant who woos a ‘Native American’ princess, before betraying her into slavery in the West Indies. In his version, Duck gives significant voice and character to a pointedly Africanised Amanda, who describes a portentous nightmare about her coming enslavement. This passage, which evokes plantation slavery in detail, was unprecedented at this time in focusing on the psychological as much as physical violence of slavery, and on Britain’s responsibility for this evil (Bridgen, 2020, p. 202). If Duck poorly represented women’s work in amplifying his own toils, he was curiously alert to the economic underpinnings and extreme brutality of forced labour in Britain’s colonies.

Before the extension of the franchise in 1918 and 1928 to allow working-age men (and latterly women) to vote, the radicalism of working-class writing was as much about claiming an ability to speak, and embodying the existence of working perspectives, as it was about forwarding particular political positions. This collection of essays seeks to build on important recent shifts in the scholarly study of working-class writing, away from a privileging of ‘more recognizable proto-proletarian perspectives’, to the more complex ways in which resistance was encoded by those facing ‘practical limitations [and] who wished to find their way into print’ (Keegan, p. 4). The early stress Donna Landry placed on the double-voicedness or ‘hybridity’ (p. 29) of labouring-class writing has clearly proven influential, inspiring a reconsideration of how inherited literary forms (and the ideologies they reflect) could be questioned and adapted through imitation, and new archival approaches exploring the difference between public and private personae. The shoemaker-poet James Woodhouse is a case in point: his early, 1760s writing had long been dismissed in modern scholarship as sycophantic, especially when compared to his radical later works. His private correspondence, however, reveals a countercurrent stress on ‘equality’, physical fights to maintain access to land, and (anonymous) interventions in newspapers over his public portrayal, shedding a wholly different light on his ability ‘to simultaneously occupy and oppose dominant and dominating cultural discourses’ (Bridgen, 2017, p. 134).

Even after the transition to an autonomous and more clearly ‘proletarian’ working-class literature in the nineteenth century, radicalism still might take less apparent forms: whether it be miners’ expressions of cross-species solidarity with ‘pests’ in their working environment, examined in Kirstie Blair’s chapter, or the juxtaposition of tunes and words to comment on contemporary affairs, as discussed in Rebekah Erdman’s ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’ chapter, working-class and radical writers used the available expressive means to comment on the world around them. That working-class writers were rarely afforded time to compose their ideas, that they faced greater scrutiny from gatekeepers, and that their reputations as well as literary remains were rarely preserved in a way they might wish, of course makes it much harder to recognise their significance today. Our contributors employ a variety of approaches to remedy this imbalance, encompassing detailed biographical treatments and historical contextualisation; close archival work and the recovery of scattered working-class lives; comparative analyses across periods or cultures; interdisciplinary work considering different expressive forms; and through the application of relevant theoretical lenses – including feminism, postcolonialism and post-humanism. They consequently present new methods and ways of thinking about how working-class and radical writers pushed back against class society, as well as other intersecting forms of domination, and how, from the margins, they attempted to participate in or even to lead the changes they wished to see.

This study is divided into five parts that are both thematic and loosely chronological, isolating changes over three centuries in writing styles and themes, the circumstances authors confronted, and authors’ presentation in the literary marketplace. The coverage also aims to complement other work in the field, such as A History of British Working-Class Literature (2017), with its 2018 Irish and American sister volumes (Goodridge and Keegan; Pierse; Coles and Lauter). Thus our first part includes chapters on Stephen Duck, the first publicly successful working-class poet; Thomas Trotter, a Scottish poet and naval physician who made important contributions to the antislavery cause; the nature poet John Clare; and a chapter on working-class writers, the marketplace and their Romantic-period Svengali, Robert Southey. If it seems odd to begin with the death of a poet, William Christmas’s careful investigation into the ‘enigmatic’ drowning of Stephen Duck, that is because a mountain of ideological opinion-making was built on the supposition that it was a suicide, which he now questions. The supposed ‘lesson’ of Duck’s demise was one Samuel Johnson applied, in discussing James Woodhouse: that he ‘may make an excellent shoemaker but can never make a good poet’ (Boswell, p. 395). Despite clear evidence that Duck found a fulfilling life as a clergyman and valued sermoniser, labelling him a suicide let commentators assert that he should never have been removed from his ‘simple’, ‘healthful’ job as a fieldworker twenty-five years earlier, and that workers should do their jobs and not concern themselves with words, poetry or troublesome ideas. The cobbler should ‘stick to his last’, an ideology that would lead to such travesties as Sir Leslie Stephen stating in the Dictionary of National Biography, unevidenced, that the poet Robert Bloomfield in later years ‘lacked independence and manliness and would have gone mad had he lived any longer’. It is a narrative of failure, the supposedly inevitable lot of the working-class poet.

If the ideological superstructure built on Duck’s tragic death sharply illustrates the negative perception of the working-class writer, Tim Fulford explains how Robert Southey used a less toxic ideal of what a working-class poet should be in marketing figures like the ‘farmer’s boy’ Robert Bloomfield, the young Nottingham writer Henry Kirke White and the restless Irish poet Thomas Dermody. Southey’s well-intentioned promotion of working-class poets did, however, include one desideratum: that the poet should ideally be both young and dead, limiting the value of his interventions to the poet if not to posterity. Nevertheless, the ‘boom’ in such poetry certainly benefited some, and paved the way for later, more self-governed and independent working-class poets to thrive.

Thomas Trotter raises different issues, in Adam Bridgen’s chapter. The radicalism in early working-class poets like Stephen Duck and Mary Collier often lay, not in any overt challenge their writings made to the existing order, but in the very fact that they boldly wrote their working lives in the satirical couplet style of Dryden and Pope, seizing the literary tools of the elite. But in Trotter we see the conscious emergence of a radical reforming spirit, who resented slavery but struggled to distance himself from it as a naval surgeon discharged in Liverpool in 1783. His subsequent employment on a slaving voyage, however, shaped a quite different kind of protest from his prior anti slavery verses. Embedding an unprecedentedly detailed and influential account of the slave trade within his debut medical work, Observations on the Scurvy (1786), Trotter exemplifies a kind of quiet, strategic insurgency that is less historically visible, precisely because he had to be careful not to alienate the ideological commitments and interests of the powerful and those whom he served.

Moving back to the fields where Duck and Collier, Bloomfield and Trotter had started out, Simon White focuses on John Clare’s ‘distinctive middle-period poetry’ whose characteristically ‘immersive’ view of nature is ‘not replicated in the work of any other Romantic poet’, relating this to humanist/post-humanist debates. Surveying a rising interest in the treatment of animals and changing attitudes to nature, White believes these mature works ‘challenge the anthropocentrism’ of other writings, including Clare’s own earlier verses. In the Northborough sonnets, notably, natural images may be unsubordinated to human presence, offering a ‘new post-humanist poetic’. Clare’s own struggles with identity perhaps fostered a less egotistical perspective than those of his contemporaries, but it should not surprise us to see a working-class poet innovating. Duck and Collier, Woodhouse and Bloomfield, Elizabeth Hands and Ann Yearsley, among others, created new and variant poetic forms and ways of looking for labouring-class poets in the century before Clare. It is always useful to see such developments closely analysed.

The five chapters in the second part reflect the wealth of material emerging in the Victorian period, fired by changes in education, the expansion of the press, new political energies born in the upheavals of the Age of Revolutions, and mass movements for greater representation and social equality. Both Rebekah Erdman and Stephen Roberts highlight the growing potency of regional culture, vitally important to the fuller emergence and reception of working-class and radical writing. The Jone o’ Grinfilt ‘family of ballads’ from north-west England examined by Erdman were an immensely popular, proliferating form, sung and recited wherever people gathered. Based on the idea of a single, identifiable character, ‘Jone o’ Grinfilt’, a (sometimes uncommon) ‘common man’ whose adventures are expounded in the ballads, they ultimately offered an ‘expression of their own experiences’ to the listener, especially regarding the hardship which makes ‘Jone’ join the army. Ballads are primarily oral, raising preservation issues, and losing or distorting such material marginalises working-class culture. Erdman looks at ‘remediation’, the ‘representation of one medium in another’, around how material of this sort is transmitted, transformed and re-contextualised, and what is lost en route, for example through pre-conceptions about ‘authenticity’.

For Stephen Roberts, regional culture gains strength by reaching out to the big issues and the wider world, bringing its own particularity out of isolation. When Robert Owen came to Birmingham in 1832 to ‘deliver lectures and address meetings in support of his proposal’ for ‘equitable labour exchanges’, 8,000 people came, and earlier in that momentous year, in May, fully 200,000 had shown up for an outdoor meeting to campaign for parliamentary reform: a ‘vast sea of human beings’ as proudly recounted in H.H. Horton’s poem Birmingham (1853). Change was in the air, and this forgotten poet of humble origins, resurrected in Roberts’s chapter, campaigned to improve conditions in his city in his long poems; railing against poverty, he also echoes Owen’s ideas in his condemnation of ‘private accumulation’. In expanding commercial and industrial cities like Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester, working-class poetry and popular culture reflected the growth of mass movements for reform, and resistance to the dehumanising effects of industrialisation. We get a real sense, in Roberts’s deep-diving local research, of intense networking in the reform and progressive movements, often revolving around ‘determined, principled men’ like Horton, morally driven figures fighting ‘poverty, injustice, cruelty and greed’.

If we began with how a labouring-class poet’s life and death are remembered, Florence Boos raises the equally important question of how their words are presented. Having in her earlier work rediscovered an entire field of Victorian working-class women poets ghosted by earlier scholarship, she now offers a rare instance where we see a woman’s poetry both before and after it has been edited. Patronage meant mediation, and Boos highlights ways that patrons, publishers and newspaper editors, the first mediators of poetry, might impose agendas of their own onto working-class women poets, such as ‘norms of educated syntax and conventional metrics’, or ‘sentiments deemed appropriate for lower-class women: religious, patriotic, domestic, and edifying’. Needless to say, these were not necessarily what these women wished to say, or how they wished to say it. Clare’s and Keats’s arguments with their publisher about his ‘cleaning up’ their poems for a polite readership show that this problem had a history. For a woman poet of humble origins, the moralising element, indeed the whole process of mediation, could be markedly more severe. Boos compares early self-published ‘booklets’ of the poet Elizabeth Campbell with the later ‘official’ volume of her poems, Songs of My Pilgrimage (1875), produced under the patronage of male literary worthies. Her poems of intense loss and grief, written in appropriately ‘broken and uneven’ metrics, became smoother and more pious, while the troubles she urgently needed to express in her verses, including ‘poverty, bereavements, displacements, her husband’s disability, and the disruptions of war’, are robbed of impact and overlaid with consolatory sentiment.

John Rignall, whose organisational and editorial collaborative work with Klaus helped link ‘green’ ecological thinking with ‘red’ Marxist theory (a topic addressed by Luke Lewin Davies in our final chapter), offers the recovered radical voice of Helen Macfarlane, a contemporary of the novelists George Eliot and Eliza Lynn Linton, yet standing apart from ‘other middle-class women writers of her day’ through her ‘fierce radicalism’ and the ‘strength of her political commitment to socialism’. Macfarlane was the first to translate the Communist Manifesto into English, while Lynn Linton was a natural iconoclast who attacked the Church establishment into which she was born (daughter of a clergyman and grand-daughter of a bishop), while attempting in her most successful novel, The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), to rescue simple Christian ideals in the cause of progressive politics and to respond to the great upheavals of her era. The study of these radical women thinkers in the key century between Mary Wollstonecraft and the Suffragettes is much enhanced by such recoveries.

In ‘The Pit Mice’, Kirstie Blair considers Scottish and northern miners through the fauna they encountered in their work. These verse interactions may resist the miners’ own portrayal in Victorian culture as animal-like, underground creatures whose emergence provokes unease in polite society. Blair’s nuanced essay discriminates between working and wild animals, seeing precedents for these poems in Burns’s deeply influential mouse, and in sentimental and sensibility verse. The surprising diversity of living creatures in a mine feeds an impulse to catalogue the ‘zoogeographies of the industrial workspace’ and to consider how animals were seen by humans: as companions, or pests, or (as in White’s reading of Clare), simply co-existing in a natural, non-instrumental way.

Perhaps the greatest social change of the century was the mass movement from country to town effected by enclosure and industrialisation, whose psychic and cultural effects continue to resonate. Heidi Renée Aijala opens our early twentieth-century material with a radical writer who uses the pastoral mode in her powerful socialist critique of capitalism to underline the immense loss this migration created. Aijala notes the contrast between Katharine Glasier’s non-fiction, firmly focused on ‘industrial violence and political unrest in industrial towns’, and her short fiction, positing the ‘rural landscapes’ and ‘agrarian countryside’ of the Derbyshire Peak District. Glasier was neither the first nor the last to express this binary, but in her dual forms of writing she draws it out in sharp, Marx- and Morris-inflected, politically focused ways. Aware that every advance in humanity’s progress could also be a step into new forms of imprisonment for many, her ruralist solutions, for Aijala, offer a ‘unique ecosocialist perspective, one that imagines nature as a regenerative, sustainable system’.

In a perceptive re-appraisal of the work of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Kathleen Bell nails another unhelpful perception about working-class writers, the ‘widespread assumption – not just among literary critics – that the role of the working-class or labouring-class writer must be to represent their own class experience, making it available for interpretation and emotional responses from a largely middle-class readership’. Carnie Holdsworth’s poetry, fiction and journalism has gained fresh attention in recent years, working as it does at the intersection of class and gender, and offering an intelligent independent perspective on culture and humanity, inflected by but not confined to her class experiences. There is a lot to unpack here: about literary aspiration, its restraints and achievements; about types of reading; about how a writer like Carnie Holdsworth finds, holds and relates to her readership, and indeed how ‘creative work – whether music, art or writing – is received’ – and used.

In the last of our ‘pioneer’ chapters Livi Michael compares two novelists from opposite ends of the twentieth century, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Tessa Hadley, and spells out something that is implicit in Aijala’s and Bell’s chapters: a powerful sense of how early twentieth-century writers anticipate later concerns. Both Michael’s authors are concerned with women’s experience, seen in terms of restriction and the desire to bypass it and live a full life, even when there is no satisfactory road map. Their differing experiences and time periods offer telling comparisons in the struggles of characters around education, sexuality, family roles and career paths.

The post-war period is represented by three distinctive studies, one on comparative masculinities, and two on how radical new cultural and educational fields could be unfriendly to women, from theatre cleaners to progressive research centres. Masculinity takes on differing colourations in Steve Eszrenyi’s study of English and West German miners’ novels, struggling to conform to the new orthodoxies in the rebuilt republic, often stubbornly resistant across the Channel in England. Importantly, Eszrenyi’s approach – comparing the perspectives of contemporary working-class writers across different countries, and in different languages – extends a new impetus towards internationalising working-class literary studies, as exemplified in Lennon and Nilsson’s expansive, two-volume survey of successive national traditions (2017 and 2020). Eszrenyi’s comparative approach proves generative, shedding light on how varied political and historical circumstances shape working-class writing across different countries. As with Grassic Gibbon and Carnie Holdsworth in the pre-war period, and Tessa Hadley later, the evolving form of the working-class novel (much examined in recent scholarship) enables the nuancing of conceptions of masculinity, via well-realised characterisation and narrative, offering an alternative social history for the period.

But what of those who contributed to the development of post-war culture – specifically theatre – but lacked forms like the novel or poetry through which to describe their experiences? The Unity Theatre, a working-class theatre company founded in the 1930s, confronted this question, producing a rich array of progressive, polyphonous and multiracial productions (an unusually extensive archive of which remains in the Working Class Movement Library and in the Victoria and Albert Museum). Working outside the traditional archive, Sarah K. Whitfield re-creates the world of the theatre cleaner in the twentieth century, offering a rich picture of a sub-culture. Though based on written language, the theatre is an oral medium, which means (as with Erdman’s balladry, and the Gypsy women of Ingrid von Rosenberg’s later chapter) that its own history rests upon storytelling and is easily forgotten. The ‘disappearing labour’ of the cleaners parallels the ‘ephemeral nature of theatrical performance’: for ‘as soon as it is done, it needs doing again’. Whitfield’s powerful re-creation here is a hedge against the disappearance of this alternative history. We are invited to ‘read’ her ‘empty mopped stage’, the product of tireless, repeated female labour, as the ‘blank page’ on which the evening’s performance will be written.

More obviously equipped to tell their own story were the second-wave feminists who ‘broke into’ the newly hatched Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), at its birthplace in Birmingham, during the 1960s and 1970s. However, as Monika Seidl reminds us in her chapter, institutional pushback against the feminists who wished to study critically ‘the two spheres of class and patriarchy’ made for an explosive encounter. While wishing to include women, the centre’s initial paternalism (and even reactionary misogyny) produced a feminist insurgency which Seidl expertly narrates through the CCCS archives and Stuart Hall’s recollections. Looking back to this important period, Seidl elevates the centre’s early women as a model for the continuous ‘contesting, negotiating, even “wrestling” and struggling’ which accompanies (and indeed is a requirement of) the move from absence to presence.

The final part brings us into a period where working-class writers, radicals and the culturally marginalised became increasingly politicised, as working-class identity was complicated, but also enriched, by the breakdown of Britain’s once sprawling empire. While social and economic changes after the war, as Eszrenyi’s chapter explores, may have shaken traditional ideas about working-class masculinity, this period sees the increasing presence and voices of non-white authors whose class marginalisation was compounded by their ‘racial’ or ethnic identification. Discussing the 1971 novel Water with Berries, Matti Ron explores George Lamming’s creative attempts to evoke the dissonance which the postcolonial turn could cause for diasporic individuals. Urged by a radicalism unlike that of the older generation of Caribbean writers, Lamming’s working-class origins, as Ron suggests, lent to a sophisticated rejection of both the restitution of power to a ‘native’ middle class in the former colonies, as well as the continuance of colonial relations in Britain itself (in his near-allegorical depiction of this novel’s main protagonist, Teeton, coming to realise his subjection to his landlady). As Lamming dramatises in the novel’s Tempest-like final scenes, wresting language back from the rule-setters to express one’s own feelings is a fundamental precondition for radical confrontation with embedded, asymmetrical power relations.

Ingrid von Rosenberg’s Gypsy women, whose lifestyles raise the same issues facing characters in the earlier women’s novels discussed, similarly negotiated compounded marginalisation. Exploring late twentieth-century memoirs alongside Louise Doughty’s novel Stone Cradle (2006), von Rosenberg shows how Gypsy women writers resisted the twin poles of ‘demonisation and romanticisation’ and how they worked to describe the hardship of their lives while avoiding demeaning their way of life. If the memoirists’ desire to defend their culture might mean glossing over the subordinate position of women within it, this is not the case in Doughty’s novel, which attempts to transcend such binaries by reimagining the shared realities facing women of both the ‘white working class and the Romani’ – pointing, as in Ron’s account of Lamming, to forms of class solidarity that underlie ostensible racial differences.

Our final essay confronts working-class responses to perhaps the most enduring legacy of empire: the climate crisis. Luke Lewin Davies brings present-day debates surrounding Marxist ecology to bear on working-class writing, considering how the latter’s anticipation of such ideas might supplement and offer ways forward for current political thought. Davies provides a rallying cry for the historical, intellectual and socio-cultural importance of consulting working-class perspectives, not just for a fuller understanding of the ecological (and ethical) debt the West has accrued over the last 300-plus years, but a potentially reparative one. This raises the question of what the world might look like had the writers explored in this volume been allowed greater freedom to write, and had at their disposal the means of translating their ideas into reality – questions confronted early on in Klaus and Rignall’s influential collection of essays on ‘the red and the green’, as Davies notes.

Having encouraged, read and edited this assembly of essays on working-class and radical writers, it is evident to us that they rarely get the credit they deserve for their ideas and interventions, both on and off the written page. As our various excavations and approaches show, recovering their significance and contributions helps to challenge historical narratives that overshadow working-class activism, and in doing so reveals a richer history whose range of participants is far wider than we may at first think. The contributions of those who could not be overt political campaigners, or lacked the cultural capital to be leaders of progressive reform, are often lost, though their small acts (like Bob Marley’s ‘Small Axe’, in Ron’s chapter) formed a significant and original part of an ongoing mission to hew at the vast structures of domination and discrimination which remain still with us. We hope that the volume does not just reflect new directions in the study of working-class and radical writing, be this on the topics of slavery and empire, masculinities and gender dynamics, or animal studies and ecology, therefore, but underlines the importance – more than ever – of paying attention to the voices of those workers and radicals who sought to tell others about their world, to bring things to light, and in various ways to change it, to shift the dial.