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Helen Rogers, Working-Class Autobiographers Born 1819, Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 24, Issue 4, October 2019, Pages 440–452, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz047
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Extract
Autobiographical testimony was one of the most significant literary outputs of working-class Britons in the nineteenth century. Of 2000 autobiographers of humble birth indexed by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, at least three-quarters lived through part of Victoria’s reign.1 An acute awareness of generational identity and change pervades their first-person narratives.2 Conscious that the traces of their forebears were lost from history, most intertwined personal and collective experience in a determined effort to record the struggles and aspirations of past generations for those to come. That motivation is apparent in the five memoirs, listed in the bibliography, composed by those born the same year as Victoria, all men.3
The first part of this article examines the life-narratives of these men, none of whom saw himself as ‘Victorian’, though in 1968 the great-granddaughter of John Hopkinson (died 1894) published his untitled memoir as the Victorian Cabinet-Maker.4 In many respects, their autobiographies are akin to numerous exemplary memoirs by and about men of humble origins that, along with the biographical sketches in Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, played no small part in associating the idea of improvement with Victorianism.
