Acknowledgements

We set out with the idea for a twin-themed collection examining radical and working-class writings, the chief research areas of H. Gustav Klaus, as a response to the loss of a greatly admired fellow scholar and with a view to ensure that the work he began would continue to evolve. We have received vital support along the way from many individuals in the fields of working-class and radical writing, social and cultural history, and the friends and colleagues of Professor Klaus in Britain, Germany and the United States, including members of his family. We are deeply grateful for their enthusiastic encouragement which has done much to help us on our journey. We are thankful, too, to the University of London Press publishing committee and to all at the press, including our editor Emma Gallon, cover designer Nicky Borowiec and the peer reviewers for their helpful reports. We are also grateful to our friends and family for their unfailing support (and occasional assistance with German–English translations), and to the South Wales Miners’ Library and the Unity Theatre Trust, for the use of the wonderful 1937 poster designed for the opening of the Goldington Street ‘New Workers Theatre’ for our cover image.

Besides the loss of fellow thinkers in the field such as Gustav Klaus and our contributor Stephen Roberts (on whom see further below), an unavoidable challenge which shaped this volume has been the current crisis in the academic sector, which has affected a number of our contributors directly, and more generally left many excellent colleagues in their prime facing very difficult decisions. The impact of government underinvestment, the downgrading of the arts and humanities in the UK and elsewhere, and – perhaps most of all – a devaluation of the most human dimension of the humanities, the people who teach it, has been a palpable backdrop against which this collection was formed. In thanking all our contributors for their patience, wisdom and invaluable knowledge, therefore, we especially thank those who have striven to work and contribute in spite of these difficulties. Facing precarity and crisis, albeit of a slightly different kind from that faced by so many of the authors in our study, has only increased the relevance and urgency of the work we do. In this context, we are more than usually grateful for the institutions which have, at different stages, supported the work involved in the editing of this book, in particular the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, the Department of English at Durham University, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Last, but not least, we should like to acknowledge here some of the pioneers in the field whose work has helped to shape this volume in more indirect ways. The study of working-class writing has benefited immensely from the work of scholars who have sought to make it more accessible. In addition to the open access ‘Catalogue of British and Irish Labouring-Class and Self-Taught Poets, 1700–1900’ edited by John Goodridge, important here are Kirstie Blair and Michael Sanders’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded ‘Piston, Pen and Press’ project, and Simon Rennie’s ‘Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861–5)’ project. While ‘recovery’ work is sometimes seen as less important than the created knowledge of literary analysis, we should look at this the other way round: this is scholarship that aspires to reimagine the literature and history of Britain, and also has the generosity of spirit and public-mindedness to provide rich materials for others to explore. Recovery begets discovery, and discovery the curiosity to dig deeper, to grapple with, and to seek to render visible the often-occluded literature and insights of the great majority of the people. These recent projects are exemplars of the kind of impactful work that is possible, and of the importance of open access and large-scale digital enterprises, to ensure that writing ‘from the margins and from below’ is not just the preserve of an academic ‘elite’ but the inheritance of as wide and diverse an audience as possible.

Note: Professor Stephen Roberts died, sadly, in July 2022, not long after he submitted his chapter to the present editors. We are humbled by his early commitment to this volume, a small but valued consolation for the loss of a great scholar, whose work on Victorian Birmingham was exceptional, and whose writings on Chartism, and involvement, along with Dorothy Thompson and others, in annual ‘Chartist Days’ was of vital importance in keeping the knowledge of this inspiring radical movement alive and actively studied. Stephen worked in both school classrooms and university lecture halls and seminar rooms, and he brought a rich educational ethos and a mature, humane wisdom to all that he did and wrote. RIP.