Roundtable: Piston, Pen & Press

INTRODUCTION
1. WORKING-CLASS LITERATURE AND VICTORIAN STUDIES

Until relatively recently, working-class literature has occupied a minimal role within Victorian Studies, exciting only intermittent interest in the disciplines of English Literature and History. In the former, the absence of a recognized ‘great’ labouring-class or artisan writer (comparable to Robert Burns, John Clare or William Blake from the Romantic era) prevented working-class literature from securing even a toehold in the field of literary studies for many years. In History, while working-class autobiography has long been recognized as a valuable source, it has generally been handled (as Carolyn Steedman noted in an essay for the very first issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture) as if the text were a neutral receptacle for an equally unmediated ‘content’; a biscuit barrel into which the fact-hungry historian may dip for a tasty morsel. Caught between the Scylla of aesthetic inferiority and the Charybdis of formal inattentiveness, working-class literature has historically speaking been, at best, an outlying area of interest within Victorian Studies.

Its status as an outlier within the Anglo-American academy is suggested by the fact that of the field’s pioneering studies – Yuri Kovalev’s Anthology of Chartist Literature (1956), Martha Vicinus’s The Industrial Muse (1974), Phyllis Mary Ashraf’s Introduction to Working-Class Literature in Great Britain (1978) and Ulrike Schwab’s The Poetry of the Chartist Movement (1987) – only The Industrial Muse emerged from within the Anglo-American academy. Indeed, aside from Brian Hollingworth’s Songs of the People (1978), British academia in particular had little to say about working-class literature prior to the publication of Brian Maidment’s ground-breaking The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987). Maidment’s anthology and accompanying critical essays extended far beyond Chartist literature and discussions of Romanticism’s influence, drawing attention to the broad range of working-class poetic production throughout the Victorian period and identifying the multiple roles of such poetry within working-class culture.

Chartist literature has continued to cast a long critical shadow, generating important studies including Anne Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (1998), Ian Haywood’s ground-breaking work on both Chartist fiction and journalism including Chartist Fiction (1998) and The Revolution in Print (2005), Mike Sanders’ The Poetry of Chartism (2009), Margaret A. Loose’s The Chartist Imaginary (2014), Rob Breton’s The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction (2016), and Greg Vargo’s An Underground of Early Victorian Fiction (2018) and Chartist Drama (2020). Scholars have also ventured beyond Chartism, with notable work from John Goodridge and others in editing Pickering & Chatto’s Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets (2006), plus Goodridge and Bridget Keegan’s edited A History of British Working Class Literature (2017); Florence Boos’s studies of working-class women poets and Scottish writers, including the anthology Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain (2008) and Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women (2017), and Kirstie Blair’s Working Verse in Victorian Scotland (2019), which builds on William S. Donaldson’s Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (1986). Victorian working-class writing is also establishing itself online, with pioneering projects such as the ‘Laboring-Class Poets Online’ (https://laboringclasspoetsonline.omeka.net/items/show/2) and Ian Petticrew’s ‘Minor Victorian Poets and Authors’ (https://minorvictorianwriters.org.uk/) now followed by projects such as The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861–5) (https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk) overseen by Simon Rennie, Brian Maidment and Ruth Mather, as well as our own Piston, Pen & Press (https://www.pistonpenandpress.org).

Despite this growing body of scholarship, the examination of working-class literature in the field of literary studies is still bedevilled by questions of aesthetic quality. What we might call ‘The Great Tradition’ approach to literature, concerned, as it is, with ranking individual authors in terms of their perceived quality, has generally been certain that working-class literature belongs in the lower divisions of their literary leagues. Framed in this manner, working-class literary production has generally been regarded as essentially derivative, an attempt (often unsuccessful) to imitate the forms and models of elite culture. A more productive critical current, exemplified by Ashraf and Janowitz, has insisted on the relative autonomy of working-class culture and argued that what had previously been seen as ‘failure’ to reproduce a given form might be better understood as indicating the basic lack of fit between working-class experience and the genres of elite culture. This critical tradition suggested that rather than framing the debate in terms of the aesthetic failings of working-class writers, it would be more productive to interrogate the limits of elite cultural models and consider the possibility that working-class writers were actively engaged in trying to develop an aesthetic capable of capturing their experience. More recently, the work of Haywood, Vargo, and Breton, has demonstrated the ways in which working-class radical culture actively shaped elite culture in the early Victorian period.

These critical developments have been accompanied, and often influenced, by theoretical work which has reconstituted the category of the ‘aesthetic’ by recovering its historical and political dimensions. In Victorian Studies, the work of Isobel Armstrong and Caroline Levine has been especially influential in establishing an understanding of the ‘aesthetic’ as an heuristic, sense-making practice. Broadly speaking, this reformulation of the aesthetic treats literary styles and genres as forms of social consciousness which are both determined and determining. Within such a critical framework, working-class literature provides access to the ways in which working-class writers interpreted and understood the wider social order. Furthermore, precisely because such writers are often seen as representative of a wider working-class community, there is a tendency to claim that working-class literature allows us to reconstruct the ‘world-view’ or ‘mentalité’ of the wider working class. In short, working-class literature becomes a form of situated knowledge which would otherwise be unavailable to historians and literary scholars alike.

2. THE SPECIFIC CONTRIBUTION OF PISTON, PEN & PRESS

As this Roundtable attests, working-class literature now has more than a toehold within Victorian Studies. Indeed, the publication of A History of British Working Class Literature (2017) and of the MLA Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2018) demonstrates that working-class literature occupies a position within English Literature comparable to that of labour history within History. Piston, Pen & Press aims to secure and extend this toehold in a number of ways. Firstly, our project maps the engagement of industrial workers in Scotland and Northern England with literary culture in the Victorian period. We have produced a searchable database containing details of hundreds of working-class writers and also tying them, where possible, to workplaces and to the vital associational cultures of their colliery, their factory town, or their local area within an industrial city. We hope this database will serve as a springboard for future research projects and that the full transcriptions of hundreds of poems about and by industrial workers will supply material for researchers, teachers, and for local communities. Secondly, unlike much of the existing scholarship on working-class literature which has, for understandable and laudable reasons, concentrated on ‘political’ writing, our focus is more quotidian, concerned with the day-to-day routines of working-class life. In doing this we are not seeking to denigrate the ‘political’; rather we are striving to recapture as much of the complexity and variety 
of the working-class experience as is possible. Our research has been informed and enriched by working with industrial heritage museums, libraries, and creative partners, not simply in terms of sharing our research or using their resources, but in learning from them about the ways in which working-class writing might be valued by different audiences today, and exploring how this intangible heritage relates to the machinery, tools, buildings and sites which were used by the writers we study.

More than 40 years since Peter Bailey invited the ‘real Bill Banks’ to stand up, Piston, Pen & Press seeks to uncover what Bill (and, more rarely) Betty Banks wrote and read when they sat down. The articles from various members of the project team assembled in this Roundtable give a sense of the range of material collected by the Piston, Pen & Press project. Iona Craig (a PhD student associated with the project) has contributed an article exploring the politics of miners’ reading rooms in north-east England towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the tension, apparent in many of our findings, between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ cultural enterprises. Reading rooms, along with mutual improvement societies, provide the focus of Lauren Weiss’s in-depth investigation of associational culture and industrial labour in a particular locality. Lauren Weiss is the project’s post-doctoral researcher and more of her ground-breaking work on the manuscript magazines produced by Victorian mutual improvement societies can be found at the Literary Bonds website (https://www.literarybonds.org). The project’s co-investigators, Oliver Betts (National Railway Museum) and Mike Sanders (University of Manchester) contribute articles on particular groups of industrial workers. Oliver Betts analyses the ways in which railway workers used poetry both to project their identities and negotiate the emotional stresses generated by the dangerous nature of their employment. Mike Sanders explores the cultural representation of the ‘Pit Brow Lassie’ and argues that this figure, so often presented in the Victorian press as the epitome of degraded working-class womanhood, frequently becomes an object of desire when transposed into the realms of fiction and visual culture. The project’s principal investigator, Kirstie Blair (University of Stirling) discusses a distinctive subgenre of Victorian working-class poetry consisting of direct addresses to machines; these poems, Blair argues, challenge middle-class accounts of machine-human interaction by revealing the individuality rather than the uniformity of the machine and the affectionate rather than alienated relationship between the machine and its human tender. Between them these articles address the ways in which industrial workers both engaged with literary culture through reading rooms and mutual improvement societies, and used their experience of working in the textile, mining and railway industries as the basis for their own literary production. These articles are concerned with the historicity of working-class cultural production and engagement, with trying to recover the individual worker’s sense of their own identity and capacity for agency amidst the physical and emotional demands and dangers of the complex set of interlocking processes and practices gathered under that grand abstraction ‘industry’.

As part of this Roundtable we invited John Goodridge, Simon Rennie, Bridget Marshall and Fabienne Moine to participate in a conversation about our topic. John Goodridge is well-known to scholars in the field of working-class literature for his herculean efforts to establish and maintain the Labouring-Class Poets Database and its successor the Online Catalogue of Labouring-Class Poets. Simon Rennie is the Principal Investigator on the Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861–65) project, Bridget Marshall is the author of Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (University of Wales Press, 2021) and is also responsible for the @factorygothic Twitter feed. Fabienne Moine has published extensively on Victorian women’s poetry (including the work of Eliza Cook) and is currently working on a project exploring the role of poetry in the Victorian workplace. All of our contributors have played a role in bringing forgotten working-class voices to light. Goodridge and Rennie oversee significant online resources while Marshall and Moine bring an all-important transnational perspective. As is customary with JVC round tables, we asked our discussants to reflect on the topic in the context of the wider field.

The implied starting point of this discussion is that the long campaign waged by the veterans and pioneers to establish working-class literary studies within Victorian Studies has largely succeeded. Therefore, our contributors have concentrated on identifying the challenges and possibilities facing scholars in this area, as well as suggesting new lines of enquiry made possible by the ongoing process of archival retrieval. First amongst these is the matter of digitization which, all our contributors agree, has been a ‘game-changer’, and which is simultaneously possibility and challenge. Bridget Marshall, for example, notes that digitization has transformed scholarship simply by increasing the availability of primary material. Moreover, she observes that in a world structured by economic inequalities and ravaged by a pandemic ‘digitized resources are not just beneficial, but quite necessary’. The possibilities afforded by digitization are exemplified by projects such as the Catalogue of Labouring-Class Poets, Cotton Famine Poetry and our own Piston, Pen & Press. All three sites, and many others, collate and disseminate material with a view to encouraging further research. The importance of these activities should not be overlooked, for even if the working-class literary archive is not quite as ephemeral as we once thought, in its physical form it remains as scattered as it ever was.

If the promise of digitization is clear, so too are its challenges. Foremost amongst these are those familiar questions of finance and labour identified by John Goodridge. The amount of labour involved in constructing even a ‘modest’ database is considerable, the amount required to produce the (more than) 2370 entries in the Catalogue of Labouring-Class Poets would break the budget of even the most lavish AHRC grant. Furthermore, while the ‘start up’ costs are considerable, the resources required to maintain and update online resources are far from negligible and often harder to find. Beyond these challenges there remains, as Bridget Marshall reminds us, questions of access: not all sites are free to use and in the absence of a meta-guide to online resources there is always a danger of not finding material which is freely available.

There is widespread agreement amongst our contributors that digitization has created the conditions for comparative studies and that such projects are vital to the development of working-class literary studies. Bridget Marshall suggests comparing literature from different industries, John Goodridge identifies transatlantic studies, Simon Rennie points to the possibility of thematic approaches such as the representation of grief, while Fabienne Moine’s suggestion of the treatment of skill by French and British working-class poets combines the thematic and the geographic. Finally, Bridget Marshall notes the trend towards projects which are simultaneously more localized and more globalized.

Our contributors also reflect on the critical and theoretical framing of working-class literature. Fabienne Moine, for example, notes that recent scholarship has shown that ‘working-class cultures were not so ephemeral as has often been suggested’ and wonders if it might be time to revisit other preconceptions in the light of new archival evidence. Similarly, John Goodridge observes that the attempts to ‘canonize’ individual working-class writers (most notably John Clare) or to invoke multiple writers as historical ‘sources’, which characterized early studies of working-class literature, have both proved problematic; the former necessarily involved claims to exceptionalism, while the latter suppressed aesthetic considerations and effectively subordinated literature to history.

Intriguingly, all four discussants identify the relationship between the ‘network’ and the ‘individual’ as offering a productive way forward. John Goodridge draws attention to the importance of both writing communities and the periodical press (especially the local newspaper) in providing working-class writers with routes to publication. Similarly, Fabienne Moine wonders if we can extend Brian Maidment’s notion of the community Bard to literature produced for the workplace, while Simon Rennie points to the necessity of considering interclass literary exchanges. At the same time, John Goodridge calls for more research into individual writers and suggests the use of the ‘extended entry’ pioneered by Tim Burke on the Catalogue of Labouring-Class Poets. We hope that the ongoing retrieval of individual writers will help in recovering a fuller sense of a ‘working class’ community as always-already internally differentiated by gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and nationality (to name but a few constituents of ‘identity’). Yet, as generations of scholars have ruefully remarked, the identities of the many anonymous and pseudonymous writers who populate the working-class archive remain irretrievable.

Similarly, our roundtable correspondents agree that while ‘numbers are important’ (to quote John Goodridge), there is also a need to move away from quantitative approaches towards more qualitative ones. As Simon Rennie notes, projects such as Cotton Famine Poetry and Piston, Pen & Press seek to engage with the ‘aesthetic, [and] social, as well as [the] political’ dimensions of working-class poetry. For literary scholars, in particular, questions of aesthetic value cannot be evaded; not only because such questions remain integral to the discipline, but also because the enquiry, ‘Is it any good?’ remains a frequently asked question at public-facing events. These are difficult questions not least because of the relative paucity of aesthetic criteria devised specifically to assess working-class literary production. A dual strategy suggests itself here; on the one hand a critical interrogation of existing aesthetic/formal criteria in relation to working-class literary production; on the other an application of an extended notion of the ‘aesthetic’ as an inherently human capability as theorized by, for example, Isobel Armstrong in her The Radical Aesthetic (2000).

A stronger sense of the aesthetic specificities of working-class literary production is also necessary to avoid the pitfall, identified by Fabienne Moine, which attributes value to working-class literature insofar as that literature exposes the limits of middle-class observations of the working-class, and by so doing relegates working-class literature to the status of documentary. One possible way forward here is to revisit the logic and method of the ‘linguistic turn’ (as suggested in Carolyn Steedman’s ‘Linguistic Encounters of the Fourth Kind’ published in JVC in 2010) and insist on paying attention to the form, as well as the content, of textual utterances. Such an approach requires a genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue aimed at identifying the kinds of historical knowledge contained within literary texts. In short, the challenge (and promise) of the aesthetic is to produce a working-class literary history to complement our existing history of working-class literature.

The brief for our discussants was to consider the current condition of working-class literature as an area of research. As their contributions have demonstrated, it is currently a vibrant, energetic area which is building on the hard work undertaken by a number of pioneering scholars. Our contributors have identified many potential future research projects. In common with much, if not all, of the ‘Humanities’, the major challenges are financial rather than intellectual. We are all agreed on the need for large-scale collaborative projects to advance the field and hope that the relevant funding bodies will continue to provide the necessary resources. It is more difficult to see how the work required to sustain the existing infrastructure will be funded.¹

However, we refuse to end on a downbeat note. John Goodridge reminds us of how far we have travelled; Fabienne Moine suggests further roads to explore. Bridget Marshall notes the existence of vital connections between this work and present-day concerns; Simon Rennie reminds us of the ‘sheer joy of remembering and of discovery’. Achievement, possibility, relevance and joy – appropriate watchwords for the ongoing study of working-class literature. The increasing availability of digitized materials, particularly newspapers, is opening up rich new archival deposits for exploration. The articles from the various members of the Piston, Pen & Press project show some of the possibilities afforded by these new resources. We fully acknowledge that our viewpoint is partisan, but we believe that this Roundtable demonstrates the vitality and vibrancy of Victorian working-class cultural production as both object and subject of critical enquiry within the field of Victorian Studies.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

Footnotes