Author Description

"By the 1820s, falling book prices and rising literacy rates had created England's first literate working-class majority. These workers had read other people's lives. They had read "the histories of heroes" and "histories of philosophers" as one artisan author puts it, but they looked in vain for an autobiography of a fellow "wealth producer." Those who were born in the 1790s shared a revolutionary generation with Byron, Shelley and Keats, and they had seen their country's industrialization first hand. Their lives were radically different than the lives their parents had lived, and they knew that they had their own stories to tell. Between 1820 and the defeat of Chartism in 1848, forty-eight men and women wrote or spoke their autobiographies, commemorating in their own words the cultural transition that accompanied England's shift to an industrial capitalist economy. The outpouring of working-class lives was so dramatic that John Lockhart, writing in the Quarterly Review despaired that "England expect[ed] every driveller to do his Memorabilia." In Literature by the Working Class, Cassandra Falke provides a close literary analysis of five of these autobiographies, situating them in their historical and literary context but privileging each as a work of literature that deserves the same careful attention readers pay to other literary texts of the period. She has chosen works that represent the diversity of working-class life. One author, John Clare, so excelled at poetry that his work is now widely anthologized, but he was born an agricultural laborer, and he died in a madhouse. Another, Robert Blincoe, was orphaned at birth and sold into the nightmarish factory apprentice system. His contemporary, Timothy Claxton, was a gardener's boy in the service of a great house. The lady of the house provided two years of education for him, and on that slim foundation, he built a successful career as a whitesmith and founded London's first mechanic's institute. Christopher's Tho