Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne University of Oxford Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-29301-7 ISBN 978-3-030-29302-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations.
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Late Middle Ages 23
3 The Early Modern Period 107
4 The Eighteenth Century 149
5 The Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century 213
6 The Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century 259
7 The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s 311
8 The Twentieth Century: After the 1960s 357
Index 433
v Abbreviations
OG Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1986. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. SHNSP Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1988–2013. London: Faber and Faber, 2014. DDNSP Douglas Dunn, New Selected Poems 1964–2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. HCP Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed Paul Keegan. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. THCP Tony Harrison, Collected Poems. London: Penguin Viking, 2007. P3 Tony Harrison, Plays 3. London Plays 3. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. P5 Tony Harrison, Plays 5. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. PMP Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. MNSP Paul Muldoon, New Selected Poems 1968–1994. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. CRMSPH Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. CRR Craig Raine, Rich. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
vii CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Class
I am very grateful to Prof Ed Larrissy for kindly inviting me to contribute a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945–2000,1 from which came the germ of the idea for this study. What could be said in such a short piece was, of course, limited; some excellent poems were treated cursorily or not at all. This work is an attempt to flesh out that piece, to place the subject in a broader context, and to extend its coverage to ear- lier periods. This is by no means the first work to consider the relationship between literature in English and social class. A number of important works have been published in the last few decades, including Lawrence Driscoll’s Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature,2 which looks at prose fiction; John Kirk’sThe British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television,3 which is mostly concerned with prose but touches on the poetry of Tony Harrison; Julian Markels’s The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature,4 which focuses on nineteenth-century social realist fiction; Pamela Fox’sClass Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–19455; Christopher Hilliard’s To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain,6 which charts roughly the same period; editors Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon’s Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class,7 which examines twentieth-century writing, particularly of the 1930s; Ian Haywood’s Working-Class Fiction
© The Author(s) 2020 1 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_1 2 S. BYRNE from Chartism to Trainspotting8; Gustav H. Klaus’s The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing9; editors Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji’s Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–190010; more recently, editors John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan’s A History of Working-Class Literature,11 which looks at prose and poetry from 1700 to the present. Sonali Perera’s work asks whether there can be an international working-class novel.12 Before these, P.M. Ashraft published the invaluable two-volume Introduction to Working-Class Literature.13 A History of Working-Class Literature covers the period from 1700 to the present, but its foreword, focusing primarily on pre-industrial times, seems to equate working-class labour with the agrarian and pastoral. The place of working-class writing in British literary history has always been marginal. Yet archival research has increasingly turned up numbers of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish authors, princi- pally poets. To read their writing is to experience the silent majority sud- denly finding a voice, the shepherd or washerwoman or haymaker stepping forward out of the ‘dark side of the landscape’ towards us with tremen- dous energy. Plebeian poets of the rural South such as Duck, Bloomfield, and Collier are of course enormously important, and some later essays in Goodridge and Keenan’s collection do look at writing about the city. It is important to remember that poets in the twenty-first century also give voice to the silenced, as well as to consider the ethics of that ventrilo- quism, and to pay equal attention to the representations of northern and southern urban and industrial landscapes as well as northern and southern pastoral and anti-pastoral.14 Many works on twentieth-century poetry mention the social class of poets based on parental occupation, at least when that occupation is deemed to be working class, and a number of works discuss overt political statements in the poetry. Some more detailed shorter studies include sections in Paul Bentley’s Ted Hughes, Class and Violence15; Neil Roberts’s ‘Poetry and class’ in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry16; David Kennedy’s ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The staging of antithetical masculine styles in the poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’17; Peter Childs’s The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey18; and Neil Corcoran’s English Poetry Since 1940.19 This study, especially the sections on poetry between 1960 and 1999, is indebted to those. There have also been a number of works on class and American litera- ture, which is outwith the scope of this study, notably Gary Lenhart’s The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class.20 Labouring poetry 1 INTRODUCTION 3 and Chartist poetry have been the subject of a number of studies, which are surveyed in this work, but there have been far fewer studies of British and Irish poetry and class which are not restricted to the period since 1800 and which do not focus exclusively on working-class writing. Roberts argues that class ‘becomes visible in poetry only when a working- class point of view is being articulated: “[m]iddle-classness” tends to be invisible in poetry’.21 Whilst this is largely true of poetry criticism, class is significant and evident in poems and their production and reception beyond a working-class point of view, and to homogenise such a view is problem- atic. This study does not attempt to define class, though it does refer to others’ definitions.22 It does not attempt to construct a working-class genre or canon. It does not attempt to classify the class of any poet. It does accept that both poem and poet are the products of historical moments, shaped by economic-class realities but not straightforwardly reflecting them. It treats poems as imaginary constructions of social realities. It examines poems by writers who declare themselves to be of a particular class or who perform class, and it examines poetry on issues of class or issues which have been circulated or received in a way that has been determined or influenced by the poet’s assumed class. It cannot offer a comprehensive history of the representation of class in English literature, or a neat formula to explain the relationship between class and publishing or criticism, a relationship which is much less simple than ‘working-class equals excluded’. It cannot map a convenient trajectory from obscurity to canonicity for working-class poets or the reverse for writers from a higher social class. It can attempt to note some changes in the literary representation of class and in the status and reception of poetry and poets denoted as of a particular class, and it can attempt to relate the forms of poetry to these topics. It will address poetry which articulates a sense of embattlement, which positions its narrator and/or reader in solidarity and in opposition to an adversarial group, bear- ing in mind Frederic Jameson’s reminder that class consciousness is (figu- ratively) Utopian, insofar as it reflects the unity of a collectivity, the affirmation of collective solidarity.23 It will, however, also look at poetry which does not identify a ‘them’ who are versus ‘us’, which has no apparent instrumental function, but which is received and read as marked for class. In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams notes that though we argue about the effects on literature of the social origins of writers, their educa- tion, and ways of earning a living, there is a lack of any ‘outline of facts by which some of the theoretical principles could be tested’.24 Williams uses the Oxford Introduction to English Literature and the Dictionary of 4 S. BYRNE
National Biography to present an informal outline of the social back- grounds of 350 authors born between 1470 and 1920. The assignment of periods is ‘on the basis of the tenth year after the particular writer’s birth, since this is obviously a crucial age in one of the decisive factors — educa- tion’.25 He found that, within his limited sample, the social pattern of the final period is similar to that of the one preceding it (1830–1880): 1 author comes from the nobility; 39 from the gentry, merchant, and pro- fessional classes; and 13 from the families of tradesmen, farmers, crafts- men, and labourers. The educational pattern, however, differs, showing ‘the first modern majority from the national grammar (now “public”) schools’.26 This was 32 out of 53, whereas 8 went to English local gram- mar schools, 2 to private schools, 4 to elementary schools only, and 4 were home educated. Williams concludes that in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the pattern of education and career noted for historians and philosophers during the preceding period has become that of writers (of fiction, poetry, and drama) in the twentieth: ‘professional family, pub- lic school, Oxford or Cambridge’. His ‘rough check’ of authors born after 1920 shows a more varied origin (6 out of 12 from the families of trades- men and clerical and industrial workers) and a different pattern of school- ing (2 public school, 7 local grammar school, 3 other local authority schools).27 He warns against making too much of these very limited fig- ures, but suggests that they confirm the impression of some change. In the following year, Richard D. Altick attempted to provide a more comprehensive and updated outline of authors writing during a shorter period of time in his article ‘The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800–1935’.28 Altick identifies sub- jects from Fred B. Millett’s Contemporary British Literature29 and Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft’s Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature,30 thereby including not only canonical writers but also ‘journeymen’ and ‘second- and third-rate authors’.31 Williams’s and Altick’s findings are discussed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century chapters of this work, and to an extent the information provided by the DNB and authors’ biographies and autobiographies informs the post-1960 chapter, but self-identification in terms of social class or other category is considered more important than categorisation by an outside agency on the basis of education, employment outside writ- ing, or the occupation of parents. The poets under discussion in this study are British or Irish and the poetry discussed is written in English. The chapters on poetry published before 1960 consider poetry in the context of the social history of reading, writing, and publishing, each chronological chapter focusing on a differ- 1 INTRODUCTION 5 ent aspect. A few authors and texts from the late fourteenth century, the Early Modern period, the long eighteenth century, and the Victorian period provide case studies of the status of poets and poetry, representa- tions of poverty and labour, the modes of dissemination and reception, and the economics of poetry. For example, Early Modern and later coterie publication and circulation of manuscripts are considered in relation to class, as is the self-exclusion of some upper-class poets from commercial publication. Patronage and responses to patrons from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century are compared. The reception of poets categorised as ‘rustic’, ‘uneducated’, or ‘from low life’32 is examined, as are texts with an overtly political agenda, such as Chartist poems. The focus of the section on twentieth-century poetry is not only the use of poetry for polemic and the ways in which poetic forms are appropri- ated, subverted, or otherwise harnessed in the service of political state- ment, but also the ways in which social registers, dialects, and accents are represented and employed as class markers. Poetry from the mid-century, including the poetry of ‘gentility’ sometimes associated with the rise of the middle classes, is examined in terms of subject, language, and the labelling of ‘movements’ and ‘schools’. Discussion of poetry published after 1960 considers the phenomenon of the ‘scholarship boy’ (and, to a lesser extent, girl), the importance of literary magazines, and the poetry of division, in which issues of region, nation, and gender overlap with those of class. Adrian Caesar notes the prevalent perspective that arranges literature in terms of action and reaction: the poets of the 1930s reacting against Modernism; the poets of the 1940s reacting against the poetry of the 1930s; and the tendency to invest texts and authors with the status of ‘representative’ of a decade or a period.33 The mythologisation of decades and schools and movements of poetry is limiting and misleading, but at the same time, no study, especially a survey such as this which covers a long span of time, can be anything like comprehensive. Examples have therefore been chosen from the canonical works associated with key modi- fiers of the term ‘poetry’—‘plebeian’, ‘Romantic’, ‘court’, ‘thirties’—but also from other poems, to avoid privileging ‘certain styles with their atten- dant aesthetic and political ideologies […] at the expense of others’.34 I try to keep in mind Eagleton’s reminder that there is ‘no simple sym- metrical relationship between changes in literary form and changes in ide- ology’, and that form is a ‘complex, dialectical unity’ of elements, which is
partly shaped by a ‘relatively autonomous’ literary history of forms; it crys- tallizes out of certain dominant ideological structures […] it embodies a specific set of relations between author and audience.35 6 S. BYRNE
The texts considered in the twentieth-century chapters were published during a period in which the term ‘class’, like the term ‘poetry’ and indeed the term ‘literature’, was (and continues to be) interrogated, and found to be indeterminate. As Lukács notes,
Marx’s chief work breaks off just as he is about to embark on the definition of class. This omission was to have serious consequences both for the theory and the practice of the proletariat. For on this vital point the later movement was forced to base itself on interpretations, on the collation of occasional utterances by Marx and Engels and on the independent extrapolation and application of their method.36
A number of sociological works declare the term to be of little or no use. Clark and Lipset state that though social class was once ‘the key theme of past stratification work’, class is ‘an increasingly outmoded concept’.37 Pahl affirms that for sociology, ‘class as a concept is ceasing to do any useful work’.38 Countering these arguments are authors such as Goldthorpe and Marshall, who, as summarised by Breen and Whelan, distinguish their own work from Marxist analysis by not employing ‘a theory of history in which class conflict serves as the engine of change, nor a theory of class exploitation’.39 The term ‘class’ derives from the Latin classis (pl classes) and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in the sense of ‘[a] set or cate- gory of things having some related properties or attributes in common, grouped together, and differentiated from others under a general name or description; a kind, a sort’, derived from Roman history:
A group of Roman citizens who could meet a certain minimum wealth qual- ification; spec. each of the five groups into which property owners were divided for military service during the early Roman monarchy, supposedly introduced by Servius Tullius (578–535 b.c.).
Other usages listed are as follows:
.. A division or stratum of society consisting of people at the same eco- nomic level or having the same social status. A system of ordering society whereby people are divided into strata of this type. A set or category of things differentiated according to grade or quality. 1 INTRODUCTION 7
All of these come into play in the signifiers of the poetry discussed in this study. An early example of the term used to refer to social classification comes from 1583:
Sir T. Smith’s De Republica Anglorum i. xxiv. 33 The fourth sort or classe amongest vs, is of those which the olde Romans called capite censij proletarij or operæ, day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which haue…
The use of the term in the title of this study and in this introduction is inac- curate, though convenient, since the term should properly be applied only to the texts considered in the later sections. Up to and during the eighteenth century, more usual terms employed to denote social status would have included ‘order’, ‘rank’, ‘degree’, ‘station’, and ‘estate’, and there would have been frequent reference to birth, blood, and breeding as defining char- acteristics. ‘Class’ in the eighteenth century denoted any grouping by shared characteristics—important to a time greatly concerned with taxonomies. Not surprisingly, social taxonomies produced classifications of people, but the precise definition and boundaries of those classes were slippery, permeable, and interrelated. An early though not first printed definition of the term comes in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656), which defines the term as
a ship, or Navy, an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees. In Schools (wherein this word is most used) a Form of Lecture restrained to a certain number of scholars.40
The method of distinguishing between degrees of people is not spelled out but taken for granted. Calvert points out the greater significance of Blount’s subsequent definition of classical:41 ‘pertaining to a ship or belonging to a form or degree approved’. Blount goes on to give a histori- cal example:
Servius Tullius caused a general evaluation of every Citizen’s estate through- out Rome, to be taken on record, with their age; and according to their estates and age, he divided the Romans into six great Armies or Bands which he called classes; The valuation of those in the first Class was not under two hundred pounds, and they alone by way of excellency were term Classici: And hence figuratively, are our best and most approved Authors,viz such as are of good credit and authority in the Schools, termed Classici Scriptores, Classical Authors.42 8 S. BYRNE
This acknowledges that a figurative trope enables a distinguishing feature of ownership (wealth) to be made equivalent to a distinguishing feature of merit (literary quality). The OED gives as its second definition of the noun ‘class’ a seemingly objective form of grouping.
A set or category of things having some related properties or attributes in common, grouped together, and differentiated from others under a general name or description; a kind, a sort.
Delineation of relations of similarity and difference is rarely pure, transpar- ent, or disinterested, however, and evaluation and hierarchical organisa- tion become inherent in the classification:
A division or stratum of society consisting of people at the same economic level or having the same social status A system of ordering society whereby people are divided into strata of this type A set or category of things differentiated according to grade or quality (OED)
Williams acknowledges that class is an ‘obviously difficult word, both in its range of meanings and its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes a social division’.43 He places the development of the tripartite terminology of class (upper/higher, middle, lower) in the period 1770 to 1840, that is, during the period of the Industrial Revolution and emergent capitalism.44 The increased prevalence of the term ‘class’ in the second sense of a step on the ladder of social hierarchy rather than in the sense of a taxonomic group marks an acknowledgement that social position could be made rather than exclusively inherited. What changed, Williams argues, was not only a sense of the existence of greater social mobility but also an awareness that the existing social system generated social division.45 Williams traces the spread of loaded terms such as ‘productive’, ‘useful’, and ‘privileged’ classes and of ‘working class’, which appears to denote manual labourers and to exclude both non-manual labourers and anyone not in employment,46 and which required the development of more nuanced distinctions provided by terms such as ‘professional’ and ‘trad- ing’ classes and ‘of independent means’. Whereas rank, order, station, estate, and degree connote a hierarchy of inherited worth, terms such as ‘working’, ‘trade’, ‘salaried’, ‘waged’, and even ‘productive’ relate the grouping to income. He points out, however, that ‘working class’ is prob- lematic in that both the middle and working classes ‘saw themselves as 1 INTRODUCTION 9 productive in contrast to the idle aristocracies’ and because of internal class divisions based on status (occupation, dress, behaviour, attitudes).47 A class, then, is sometimes an economic category, and sometimes, par- ticularly in the work of Marx, ‘a formation in which, for historical reasons, consciousness of this situation and the organisation to deal with it have developed’.48 A Marxist conception of class includes the concept of class consciousness, and connotes division and conflict in opposition to models of social structures which emphasise order(liness). The terms ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ describe a relation to production whereas ‘middle’ or ‘lower class’, whilst not excluding this relation, are suggestive of the old hierarchi- cal relationships in society, marking relative social position. However, describing feudal medieval Europe, for example, in terms of a class system is inaccurate, given Marx’s assertion that the peasants who worked the land (in mid-nineteenth-century France) do not constitute a class, being too isolated in groups too small for the development of class consciousness:
The small-holding peasants form an immense mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into complex relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into complex interactions. […] In so far as millions of families get a living under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes and counterpose them as enemies, they form a class. In so far as there is only a local interconnection amongst peasant proprietors, the similarity of their interests produces no community, no national linkage and no political organisation, they do not form a class.49
Gary Day points out, however, that the concepts of exchange and exploi- tation can be fruitful in an interpretation of the late Middle Ages and its products, including literature, which enacts aspects of the exchange rela- tion.50 David Aers usefully employs Michael Mann’s and Jon Elster’s descrip- tions of class in his discussion of Piers Plowman. The concept directs us to consider ‘forms of power involved in the organization of “the extraction, transformation, distribution and consumption of the objects of nature”’.51
The endowments include tangible property, intangible working skills and more subtle cultural traits. The behaviours include working versus not working, selling versus buying labour-power, lending versus borrowing cap- ital, renting versus hiring land, giving versus receiving commands in the management of corporate property. […] A class is a group of people who by virtue of what they possess are compelled to engage in the same activities if they want to make the best use of their endowments.52 10 S. BYRNE
Aers observes that this directs us to consider ‘what “people (in some sense) have to do” rather than what they may choose to do’, which makes a dis- tinction between, for example, ‘a gentleman who works on a farm or gar- den for pleasure or exercise and a person who works there out of economic necessity for wages or subsidence’.53 One way in which it might be useful to consider literary texts is in terms of those which suggest that the author presents the narrative ‘I’ as from the dominant or subordinate classes.
[F]or Marxism classes must always be apprehended relationally […] the ulti- mate (or ideal) form of class relationship and class struggle is always dichot- omous. The constitutive form of class relationships is always that between a dominant and a laboring class: and it is only in terms of this axis that class fractions (such as the petty bourgeoisie) or eccentric or dependent classes (such as the peasantry) are positioned.54
Following Habermas, if we see class not only as a product of capitalism, but as a product of an emergent state in which the ruler aims to gain the loyalty of an elite by giving them privileged access to the means of production, then we can properly apply the term to the earlier period as well as to the later.55 In this model, class relations may be seen as relations of dominance and exploitation. Those relations must be legitimated for the political sys- tem to appear legitimate, and are therefore encoded and institutionalised as class. In a sense, poetry, like other genres of published writing, has an inbuilt class system, in terms of the different relationships to factors of production. Literature and money are both representations, one of reality more generally, and one of commodities. Money takes no account of the indi- vidual particular qualities of the commodities, representing only the time (and materials) taken to produce the commodity.56 When ‘money takes on an increasingly important role in the feudal economy: the development of “literature” keeps pace with the development of the capitalist economy’.57 Day asserts that in ‘enacting aspects of the exchange relation, literature enacts how that relation’s logic is contradictory. In the absence of a theory of economics, literature itself becomes a means of imagining, negotiating and even institutionalising the mechanism of exchange’; it is both the ‘ally and enemy of exchange’.58 For Day, that the social divisiveness of literature has persisted is evident in the suggestion by F.R. Leavis that ‘in any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends’.59 That minority is made to represent the 1 INTRODUCTION 11 consciousness of a race, just as much as in the fourteenth-century remark that without ‘lyterrature [i.e. book-learning] and good informacyon’ the common people are like brute beasts.60 Day asserts that to see literature in that way is to see it in terms of status, whereas to see it in relation to exchange is to see it in terms of class. More useful for this study than considering how the narrative ‘I’ of a poem, or indeed the poet, tacitly or overtly positions himself or herself is the way in which the ‘I’, or the poet, is treated.
The essence of social class is the way a man is treated by his fellows (and, reciprocally, the way he treats them), not the qualities or the possessions which cause that treatment. It would be possible, and perhaps useful, to group people simply in terms of their attributes, without asking how those attributes affected their social relations, but the result would be a study of social types, not of social classes.
In this case, ‘treatment’ of the text and the ostended ‘I’ would be the reception of the text. Postmodernism replaces class with a plethora of status choices, but this in itself has generated more discussion, disagreement, and debate about a concept and subject which seems therefore to be anything but finished. Andrew Milner asserts that class ‘seems little more than a narrative effect of Marxism, itself a grand narrative, stripped of all credibility in contem- porary culture, not only in its Stalinist versions, but even as Frankfurt School critical theory’.61 For Lyotard, ‘the social foundation of the prin- ciple of division’, that is, ‘class struggle’, has ‘blurred to the point of losing all […] radicality’.62 Postmodernity dissolves the social into ‘flexible net- works of language games’.63 Milner describes Lyotard’s postmodern as a ‘technocratic liberal-individualist utopia with little or no place for class’.64 Among others to declare the concept of class, and indeed Socialism, outworn is Baudrillard, who finds in the hyperrealisation of the social the dissolution of class.
Signs of this hyperrealisation of the social, signs of its reduplication and its anticipated fulfilment are everywhere. The transparency of the social relation is flaunted, signified, consumed everywhere. The history of the social will never have had time to lead to revolution: it will have been outstripped by signs of the social and of revolution. The social will never have had time to lead to socialism, it will have been short-circuited by the hypersocial, by the hyperreality of the social (but perhaps socialism is no more than this?).65 12 S. BYRNE
Well before the proletariat has time ‘to deny itself’, Baudrillard asserts, ‘the concept of class will have dissolved’ into ‘some parodic, extended double, like “the mass of workers” or simply into a retrospective simula- tion of the proletariat’.66 Milner, however, argues that these statements are ‘simply unsupported by evidence’, and that the ‘class character of British culture seems as undeniable as ever’.67 He cites Marshall, Newby, Rose, and Vogler’s 1984 nationwide survey of 1770 respondents (conducted, he points out, five years into Thatcherism), which found that over 90% of the sample placed themselves as either working class or middle class, and nearly 73% felt class to be ‘an inevitable feature of modern society’; and that conflict consciousness was widespread amongst manual working-class voters.68 Milner, quoting Marshall et al., finds these conclusions clear:
Social class is to the fore among conceptions of collective identity. It is still the case that important differences in shared beliefs and values are struc- tured more obviously by class than by other sources of social cleavage. … Social class still structures voting intentions … and does so no less today than in the recent past. … [T]here has been no secular decline in the ten- dency for collective identities and collective action to develop on a class basis.69
In 1996, Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters could proclaim The Death of Class70 but Erik Olin Wright sees their claim that class is not a prime social determinant as a failure to understand the increasing complexity of class relations. Whilst these complexities ‘undercut any simple-minded class analysis’ that asserts something like ‘class determines consciousness’, they do not ‘undermine the broader project of investigating the ways in which class, in interaction with other social processes, has consequences’.71 Anthony Giddens, whilst critiquing postmodern positions on class, finds that ‘lifestyle and taste, mobilized in an active way by individuals and groups, become as evident markers of social differentiation as position in the productive order’.72 Lash and Boyne find the postmodern rejection of class as a functioning concept ‘politically reprehensible’ in a time of increased unemployment and social inequality, and ‘intellectually unjustifi- able’ in the absence of an ‘empirically informed theoretical demonstration that the working classes do not still remain a highly important force for social change’.73 Countering these positions, Ken Worpole’s introduction to the anthol- ogy Once I was a Washing Machine: The Working-class Experience in Poetry 1 INTRODUCTION 13 and Prose affirms that however we may theorise away class, the lived expe- rience of it has demonstrable effects. He declares that they are wrong who affirm that ‘the only important thing is the writing—not the labels attached’, because ‘[c]lass, gender, ethnicity are not labels. People cannot put them on or take them off at will, though many might wish they could. They mark us for life.’74 Just as class is difficult to define and the class of any individual difficult to establish, so class as a defining characteristic of identity or a subject of literature should not be considered in isolation from other determinants such as location, gender, education, nationality, ethnicity, and medium. ‘“Marxist methodology can be used to formulate feminist strategy”’75 and Althusser’s version of Marxist methodology ‘is not tied exclusively to the determinants of a struggle between economic classes’.76 Though this work acknowledges that class should not be considered without gender, agree- ing with Aers that it would be in accord with Marx’s work to take ‘ruling classes’ as including ‘men’s systematic lordship over women and to make use of relevant insights and analysis of gender-formation from within femi- nist traditions’,77 space precludes much attention to this essential consideration. Collini, among others, argues that class has been the most neglected of these aspects of identity. ‘In the frequently incanted quartet of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, there is no doubt that class has been the least fashionable in recent years […] despite the fact that all the evidence suggests that class remains the single most powerful determinant of life- chances.’78 This is not a work of sociology or anthropology, so it cannot and does not seek to offer analysis of those other factors. Nonetheless, class is used to refer not to a narrowly defined concept of difference based on occupation and income, but to difference based on hierarchical classi- fication, so that it refers to writing about discrimination, marginalisation, exclusion, and devaluing of many kinds, including gender and region, pri- marily as these relate to language. Jameson states that ‘the dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code’,79 giving an example of opposed groups in mid-seventeenth-century England articulating ideological struggles within the apparent unity of the shared code of theology, ‘a religious master code’. The shared codes of literature and specifically of versification are related to the articulation of ideological struggles and may have fostered class consciousness. Indeed, the relationship between ideology and literary convention is a subject of 14 S. BYRNE this work; but whilst it may be possible to see the conscious formation of a social unity in localised writing (not literary schools or movements but networks of mutual encouragement and critique, and enabling such as those, e.g., which clustered in Leeds and Newcastle in the 1960s and after), it is important to recall that not everything published in Stand or by Northern House, or read in Morden Tower, comes out of or represents such a struggle, just as not everything published by the LRB or Poetry Review or Faber represents opposition to the working class or the regional. The object of this study is not the lucid vision denounced by Jameson, visible only to the collective unity or the organ of consciousness, the revo- lutionary party, and not amenable to being made transparent to the indi- vidual subject positioned within the social totality.80 Borrowed from Jameson, however, is the proposition that the principle of historicising should extend to viewing texts in the context of non-monolithic and non- synchronic modes of production, so that they emerge ‘in a space in which we may expect them to be crisscrossed and intersected by a variety of impulses from contradictory modes of cultural production all at once’.81 Therefore,
this new and ultimate object may be designated, drawing on recent histori- cal experience, as cultural revolution, that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contra- dictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life.
Even if class does not exist as an evident verifiable entity, a system with clear and firm boundaries, it exists as an overdetermined and sometimes auto-elective realm, as a belief and therefore presence; it can be evoked and performed.82 If ‘class psychology’ is as pervasive now as Stein Ringen asserted that it was in 1997, when the British were ‘preoccupied with the symbols of class in manner, dress and language’,83 then it is belief in class rather than the empirical, verifiable existence of distinct classes which is important. Poems as a product of cultures are commodities and represent cultural capital. Like other such products, they may include class signifiers which act as badges of the poet’s credentials and reinforce the reader’s sense of a community. This may be particularly evident in popular poetry and performance poetry, which are touched on in later sections of the study, but also in poems which reflect on their relationship to ‘high’ Art or ‘low’/popular culture, and which invite the reader to take a side. Though poetry has been proclaimed as the new rock ‘n’ roll, and though self- 1 INTRODUCTION 15 proclaimed working-class poets publish successfully, the consumption of poetry may still be regarded as a largely middle-class activity. The extent to which poets writing in a regional, working-class voice reach a regional, working-class audience is still relatively small. Nonetheless, those voices are published, and perhaps are no longer received like dogs walking on their hind legs.
Notes 1. Sandie Byrne, ‘Poetry and Class’ in Edward Larrissy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 116–129. 2. Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3. John Kirk, The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); first published as Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). 4. Julian Markels, The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). 5. Pamela Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working- Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 6. Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 7. Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Christ Weedon, eds, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985). 8. Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1997). 9. Gustav H. Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working- Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1985). 10. Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 11. John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 12. Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 13. P.M. Ashraf, Introduction to Working-Class Literature (Berlin, Humbolt University, 1980). 16 S. BYRNE
14. Donna Landry, ‘Foreword’ in John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-class Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. xvii–xxi (xvii). 15. Paul Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 16. Neil Roberts, ‘Poetry and Class: Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’ in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–229. 17. David Kennedy, ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The staging of antithetical masculine styles in the poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’, Textual Practice 14.1 (2000), 115–136. 18. Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999). 19. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940, Longman Literature in English Series (Harlow: Longman, 1993). 20. Gary Lenhart, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 21. Roberts, op. cit., p. 215. 22. For useful definitions see Peter Calvert,The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 10 ff. 23. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981); rprnt, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 290–291. 24. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 230. 25. Williams, op. cit., p. 231. 26. Williams, op. cit., p. 238. 27. Williams, op. cit., p. 239. 28. Richard D. Altick, ‘The Sociology of Authorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800–1935’ Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962), 389–404. 29. Fred B. Millett, Contemporary British Literature: A Critical Survey and 232 Author-bibliographies, 3rd rev. edn (New York: G. Harrap, 1935). 30. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 2 vols (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942). 31. Altick, op. cit., p. 391. 32. Robert Southey, ‘Introduction: Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets’, in Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant (London: John Murray, 1831). 33. Adrian Caesar, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 1. 34. Caesar, ibid. 1 INTRODUCTION 17
35. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); rev. edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 24–25. 36. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968); rprnt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), p. 46. 37. Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Are Social Classes Dying’, International Sociology 6.4 (1991), 397–410 (397). 38. Jan Pahl, Money and Marriage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 710. 39. Richard Breen and Christopher T. Whelan, Social Mobility and Social Class in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), p. 142. 40. Thomas Blount, Glossographia, or A dictionary, interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon; as are now used in our refined English tongue. Also the terms of divinity, law, physick, mathematicks, heraldry, anatomy, war, musick, architecture; and of several other arts and sciences explicated. With etymologies, definitions, and historical observations on the same. Very useful for all such as desire to understand what they read. (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656) pages unnumbered. English ShortTitle Catalogue R5788. Spelling modernised. 41. Calvert, op. cit., p. 13. 42. Blount, op. cit., np. 43. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976); rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 60. 44. Williams, op. cit., p. 61. 45. Williams, op. cit., p. 62. 46. Williams, op. cit., p. 65. 47. Williams, op. cit., p. 64. 48. Williams, op. cit., p. 68. 49. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), trans. Terrell Carver, in Mark Cowling and James Martin, eds, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 19–112 (100–101). 50. Gary Day, Class, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2001). 51. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 24, quoted in David Aers, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’ in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds, Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 59–75 (60). 52. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 330–331, quoted in Aers, op. cit., p. 61. Aers’s emphasis. 53. Elster, ibid., quoted in Aers, op. cit., p. 60. 18 S. BYRNE
54. Jameson, op. cit., pp. 83–84. 55. See Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 258. 56. Day, op. cit., p. 12. This sets aside aesthetic and other aspects of value. 57. Day, op. cit., p. 15. 58. Ibid. 59. F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930), pp. 3–4. 60. Day cites the OED 1963. Day, op. cit., p. 15, but the phrase comes from Henry Bradshaw, The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester (1513); Pynson’s 1521 edn ed. Carl Horstman, EETS OS 88 (London: N. Trübner, 1887) II, ll. 3–5 (p. 131). 61. Andrew J. Milner, Class, Core Cultural Concepts (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1999), p. 122. 62. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les Edition de Minuit, 1979) translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 13. 63. Lyotard, op. cit., p. 17. 64. Milner, op. cit., p. 123. 65. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities or, The End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1978, 1983), p. 85. 66. Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 86. 67. Milner, op. cit., p. 11. 68. Gordon Marshall, David Rose, Howard Newby and Carolyn Vogler, Social Class in Modern Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 143; 247–248. Milner’s reference. 69. Milner, op. cit., p. 11. Marshall et al., op. cit., pp. 267–268. Milner’s reference. 70. Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996). 71. Erik Olin Wright, ‘The continuing importance of class analysis’ in Lois Weis, ed., The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family and the Economy (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 25–43 (36). 72. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 143. 73. Scott Lash and Roy Boyne, ‘Communicative Rationality and Desire’ in Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism. (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 114–122 (116). 74. Ken Worpole, Once I was a Washing Machine: The Working-class Experience in Poetry and Prose (Brighton: Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, 1989), p. 1. 1 INTRODUCTION 19
75. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), pp. 1–42 (9–10), quoted in Britton J. Harwood, ‘Building Class and Gender into Chaucer’s Hous’ in Harwood and Overing, op. cit., pp. 95–111 (95). Hartmann’s emphasis. 76. Harwood, op. cit., p. 95. 77. Aers, op. cit., p. 73. 78. Stefan Collini, ‘Grievance Studies: How not to do Cultural Criticism’, in Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 252–268 (257–258). 79. Jameson, op. cit., p. 84. 80. Jameson, op. cit., p. 283. 81. Jameson, op. cit., p. 95. 82. Elizabeth I’s ‘pervasive cultural presence’ is said by Louis Adrian Montrose to be a ‘pervasive cultural condition of the play’s [Midsummer Night’s Dream] imaginative possibility’. ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’ in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 31–64 (32). 83. Stein Ringen, ‘The Open Society and the Closed Mind’, Times Literary Supplement (24 January 1997), p. 6.
Bibliography Aers, David, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, eds Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Altick, Richard D., ‘The Sociology of Authorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800–1935), Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962), 389–404. Ashraf, P.M., Introduction to Working-Class Literature. Berlin: Humbolt University, 1980. Batsleer, Janet, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Christ Weedon, eds, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class. London: Methuen, 1985. Baudrillard, Jean, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities or, The End of the Social and Other Essays. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Bentley, Paul, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 20 S. BYRNE
Blair, Kirstie, and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring- Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Blount, Thomas, Glossographia, or A Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon; As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. Also the Terms of Divinity, Law, Physick, Mathematicks, Heraldry, Anatomy, War, Musick, Architecture; and of Several Other Arts and Sciences Explicated. With Etymologies, Definitions, and Historical Observations on the Same. Very Useful for All Such as Desire to Understand What They Read. London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656. n.p. English Short Title Catalogue R5788. Spelling Modernised. Breen, Richard, and Christopher T. Whelan, Social Mobility and Social Class in Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996. Byrne, Sandie, ‘Poetry and Class’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010, ed. Edward Larrissy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 116–129. Caesar, Adrian, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Calvert, Peter, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Childs, Peter, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey. Abingdon: Routledge, 1999. Collini, Stefan, ‘Grievance Studies: How Not to Do Cultural Criticism’, in English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture, ed. Stefan Collini, 252–168. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Corcoran, Neil, English Poetry Since 1940, Longman Literature in English Series. Harlow: Longman, 1993. Day, Gary, Class, The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2001. Driscoll, Lawrence, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); rev. ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Fox, Pamlea, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Giddens, Anthony, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-Class Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Haywood, Ian, Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1997. Hilliard, Christopher, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 1 INTRODUCTION 21
Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981); rprnt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Kennedy, David, ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The Staging of Antithetical Masculine Styles in the Poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’, Textual Practice (14 January 2000), 115–136. Kirk, John, The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009; First Published as Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. Klaus, Gustav H., The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing. Brighton: Harvester, 1985. Kunitz, Stanley, and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 2 vols. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942. Lash, Scott, and Roy Boyne, ‘Communicative Rationality and Desire’, in Sociology of Postmodernism, ed. Scott Lash, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 114–122. Leavis, F.R., Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930. Lenhart, Gary, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness (1923). Trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968); rprnt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Edition de Minuit, 1979. Translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Markels, Julian, The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003. Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Trans. Terrell Carver, in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Postmodern Interpretations, eds Mark Cowling and James Martin, 19–112. London: Pluto Press, 2002. McCarthy, Thomas, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. London: Hutchinson, 1978. Millett, Fred B., Contemporary British Literature: A Critical Survey and 232 Author-Bibliographies, 3rd rev. edn. New York: G. Harrap, 1935. Milner, Andrew J., Class, Core Cultural Concepts. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1999. Montrose, Louis Adrian, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 31–64. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Nichols Clark, Terry, and Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Are Social Classes Dying’, International Sociology 6, no. 4 (1991), 397–410. Pahl, Jan, Money and Marriage. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. 22 S. BYRNE
Pakulski, Jan, and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996. Perera, Sonali, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Ringen, Stein, ‘The Open Society and the Closed Mind’, Times Literary Supplement (24 January 1997), 6. Roberts, Neil, ‘Poetry and Class: Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 215–229. Southey, Robert, ‘Introduction: Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets’, in Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant. London: John Murray, 1831. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. ———, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976); rev. edn. London: Fontana, 1983. Worpole, Ken, Once I Was a Washing Machine: The Working-Class Experience in Poetry and Prose. Brighton: Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, 1989. Wright, Erik Olin, ‘The Continuing Importance of Class Analysis’, in The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family and the Economy, ed. Lois Weis. New York and London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 25–43. CHAPTER 2
The Late Middle Ages
Introduction Class is an anachronistic term to use of the late Middle Ages, and social divisions at the time had permeable and slippery boundaries.1 The term has long been used in studies of medieval literature, however, and will be used here.2 Contemporary texts suggest that formal codification of groups arranged vertically, based on blood, family, and property, or horizontally, based on function, retained an important status long after the more rigid feudal demarcation of the three estates given authority by King Alfred,3 and Ælfric,4 and later endorsed by a speech attributed to Bishop Gerard of Cambrai-Arras5 and in a satirical poem of Bishop Adelbero, the ‘Carmen ad Rotbertum Regem Francorum’:
Triplex ergo Dei domus est, quae creditur una: Nunc orant, alii pugnant, aliique laborant. Quae tria sunt simul et scissuram non patiuntur Unius offitio sic stant operata duorum Alternis uicibus cunctis solamina praebent. Est igitur simplex talis conexio triplex Sic lex praeualuit, tunc mundus pace quieuit6 [Triple, therefore is the House of God, though it seems One: Now some pray, others fight, others labour The three are together and do not admit a division One office stands for the operations of both In turn, each provides solace for the other
© The Author(s) 2020 23 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_2 24 S. BYRNE
Therefore there is a simple threefold connection So the law prevails and the world remains peaceful.]
Though the model is hierarchical, the emphasis is often on interdepen- dency and the equal necessity of having some who pray for all, some who fight to protect all, and some who labour to feed all. The distinction between the two non-clerical classes is the enjoyment by the upper class of otium, since fighting was not labour, though this did not indicate idleness. A similar social model persisted long after the relationships of feudalism, based on fealty, vassalage, and a manorial economy, changed to relation- ships based on contracts of employment and wages, when land ownership was no longer the prime determinate of wealth, and when agricultural workers did not only labour to feed everyone but also paid taxes, tithes, fines, other levies, and rents. It persisted despite conflicts between royal and ecclesiastical authority, and even though the membership of the osten- sible categories, particularly that of the ‘gentle’, changed and the mercan- tile and clerical classes expanded. I have emphasised ‘model’, following Paul Strohm, who finds the ‘most persistent and prestigious social model of the high middle ages’ to be ‘that of the hierarchy, with its insistence on a divinely sanctioned and eternal order of vertically arrayed estates’, but notes that this received model is stretched and modified to receive new social groupings.7 Though the social structure was probably never actually perceived as simply tripartite,8 the model continued to be emphasised as ideal or ordained. The Statute of Additions of 1413 required parties in all original lawsuits to state their ‘Estate, or Degree, or Mystery’,9 and a late fifteenth-century manuscript copy of a treatise attributed to Dame Julia Berners catalogues social ranks in terms of the hawks appropriate to each degree of aristocracy and gentry:
A garfaukoun for a kynge. A faukoun jentyl & a tarselet jentylle for a pryns. A faukoun of þe roche for a duke. A faukoun perygryne for a norle. A basterd for euyry lord. A sakor & a sakorret for a knyȝte. A lannyr and a banneret for a squyer. A marlyoun for a lady. An hobby for a younge squyer. This byne haukys of þe tour þat fleythe frove þe lur. There a goshauke for a pour gentyllman. A tersell for a good yomane.10
Statutes on the regulation of apparel and diet attempt to impose visible signifiers of estate and rank, and like Dame Julia distinguish within the three nominal estates by rank, occupation, and wealth. The ranks named 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 25 are ‘grooms’, ‘craftsmen and people called yeomen’, ‘esquires and all man- ner of gentlemen below the estate of knight who do not have land or rent to the amount of £100 a year’, ‘esquires having land or rent to the value of £200’, ‘merchants, citizens and burgesses, artisans and craftsmen, within the city of London as well as elsewhere, who clearly have goods and chattels to the value of £500’, ‘merchants, citizens and burgesses who clearly have goods and chattels above the value of £1000’, ‘gentlemen who have land and rent to the value of £200 a year’, ‘knights who have land or rent within the value of 200 marks a year’, ‘knights and ladies who have land or rent above the value of 400 marks a year up to the sum of £1000 a year’, clerks, of various occupations and financial worth, and ‘carters, ploughmen, drivers of ploughs, oxherds, cowherds, shepherds, swineherds, dairymaids and all other keepers of beasts, threshers of corn and all manner of people of the estate of groom attending to husbandry, and all other people who do not have 40s. in goods, nor chattels to the value of 40s’.11 The evaluation of equivalence between ranks in terms of the kind of clothing permitted may be telling:
Item, qe marchantz, citeins et burgeis, artificers, gentz de mestere, sibien deinz la citee de Loundres come aillours, qe ont clerement biens et chateux a la value de cynk centz livres, et lour femmes et enfantz, peussent prendre et user en manere come les esquiers et gentils gentz qe ont terre et rente a la value de cent livres par an. Et qe les marchantz, citeins et burgeis q’ont clerement biens et chateux outre la value de mill livres, et lour femmes et enfantz, puissent prendre et user en manere come les esquiers et gentils gentz q’ont terre et rente a la value de deux centz livres par an. Et qe nul garceon, yoman ne servant des marchantz, marchandie artificer ou gentz de mestere ne use autrement en apparaile qe n’est ordeine des garceons et yomen des seignurs paramont. [Also, that merchants, citizens and burgesses, artisans and craftsmen, within the city of London as well as elsewhere, who clearly have goods and chattels to the value of £500, and their wives and children, may take and wear in the same manner as the esquires and gentlemen who have land and rent to the value of £100 a year. And that the merchants, citizens and bur- gesses who clearly have goods and chattels above the value of £1000, and their wives and children, may take and wear in the same manner as the esquires and gentlemen who have land and rent to the value of £200 a year. And that no groom, yeoman or servant of merchants, artisans or craftsmen may wear in apparel otherwise than is ordained above for the grooms and yeomen of lords.] 26 S. BYRNE
Another double vision of social structure can be seen in the levying of the 1379 Poll Tax. Four groups are distinguished by both estate or rank and function. The first group is clearly distinguished from the others by right of rank:
Le duc de Lancastre et le duc de Bretaigne, chescun a—.x. marcz Item, chescun conte d’Engleterre—.iiij.li. Item, chescun des countesses veoves en Engleterre, atant come les conts—. iiij.li. Item, chescun baron et baneret, ou chivaler qi poet atant despendre—.xl. s. Item, chescun baronesse veove paiera come le baron, et banresse come le baneret—.xl. s. Item, chescun
Also, the chief prior of the Hospital of St John, as much as a baron—40s. Also, every commander of the order in England, the same as a bachelor—20s. Also, every other brother knight of the said order—13s. 4d. Also, from all the other brothers of the said order, each as much as a squire without possessions—3s. 4d.]
The second grouping of those to be taxed is determined by occupation; these are men at law:
Item, chescun justice, sibien de l’un bank come de l’autre, et ceux q’ont este justices de mesmes les bankes, et le chief baroun de l’escheqier, chescun—.c.s. Item, chescun sergeant et grant apprentice du loy—.xl. s. Item, autres apprentices qi pursuent la loy, >chescun<—.xx. s. Item, touz les autres apprentices de meindre estat et attournez, chescun—. vi. s. .viij.d. [Also, every justice of either bench, and those who have been justices of the same benches, and the chief baron of the exchequer, each—100s. Also, every sergeant and great apprentice of the law—40s. Also, other apprentices who practise the law, each—20s. Also, all other apprentices of lesser estate and attorneys, each—6s. 8d.]
The third group is based on a civic hierarchy, and includes the mayor of London, who pays the same as a count, aldermen of London and other mayors, who pay the same as bachelors and squires with sufficient means to become knights:
Item, le meir de Londres paie come un conte—.iiij.li. Item, les aldermen de Londres, chescun come un baroun—.xl. s. Item, touz les meirs de les grandes villes d’Engleterre, chescun come un baroun—.xl. s. Item, les autres meirs des autres petites villes, selonc l’afferant de lour estat—.xx. s., .x. s. ou demi marc Et touz les jurates des bones villes et grantz marchantz du roialme, paient come bachilers—.xx. s. Item, autres marchantz suffisantz—.xiij. s. .iiij. d. Item, touz les meindres marchantz et artificers q’ont la gaigne de la terre, selonc l’afferant de lour estat—.vi. s. .viij. d., .iij. s. .iiij. d. ij s. .xij. d., ou .vi. Item, chescun sergeant et frankelein du paiis, selonc lour estat—.vi. s. .viij. d. ou .xl. d. 28 S. BYRNE
Item, les fermers des manoirs, parsonages et granges, marchantz des bestes et d’autre mesnue marchandie, selonc lour estat—demi marc, .xl. d., .ij. s. ou .xij. d. [Also, the mayor of London is to pay as much as an earl—£4 Also, the aldermen of London, each as much as a baron—40s. Also, all the mayors of the great towns of England, each as much as a baron—40s. Also, the other mayors of the remaining small towns, according to the extent of their estate—20s., 10s. or half a mark And all the jurats of large towns, and the great merchants of the kingdom, are to pay as much as gentlemen—20s. Also, other sufficient merchants—13s. 4d. Also, all lesser merchants and artificers who have profit from the land, according to the extent of their estate—6s. 8d., 3s. 4d., 2s. 12d., or 6 Also, every sergeant and franklin of the country, according to their estate— 6s. 8d. or 40d. Also, the farmers of manors, parsonages and granges, merchants dealing in livestock, and other lesser merchandise, according to their estate,—half a mark, 40d. 2s. or 12d.]
The fourth group brings together other men in the legal professions, par- doners and summoners (3/4), and hostelers below the estate of merchant, but excludes ‘genuine beggars’.
Item, touz les advocatz, notairs et procuratours mariez, paient come ser- geantz de loy; apprentices du loy et attournez, chescun selonc son estat—. xl. s. .xx. s. ou demi marc Item, pardoners et sommoners mariez, chescun selonc son estat,—.iij. s. .iiij. d., .ij. s. ou .xij. d. Item, touz les ostilers qi ne sont mye al estat de marchant, chescun selonc son estat—.xl. d., .ij. s. ou .xij. d. Item, chescun homme mariee, pur lui et sa femme qi ne sont mye des estatz suisnomez, outre l’age de .xvi. ans, forspris verroies mendinantz—.iiij. d. Et chescun homme et femme soles de tiel estat et oultre l’age suisdite—.iiij. d. [Also, all advocates, notaries and proctors who are married are to pay as much as serjeants at law, apprentices of the law and attorneys, each accord- ing to his estate,—40s. 20s. or half a mark Also, pardoners and summoners who are married, each according to his estate—3s. 4d., 2s. or 12d. Also, all innkeepers who do not belong to the estate of merchants, each according to his estate—40d. 2s. or 12d. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 29
Also, every married man, for himself and his wife, if they do not belong to the estates named above and are over the age of 16, except genuine beggars—4d. And every single man and woman of such estate and over the said age—4d.]12
The status of peasant, landed or unlanded, is not specified; the final catch-all is just men and women over the age of 16 not of the estates named above. A strong sense of distinctions of estate and the appropriate manner of living for individuals of each estate can still be seen in some literary texts of the later Middle Ages, including the ‘estates satires’, which divide soci- ety into estates in order to catalogue the failings of each one.13 Not all texts represent clear-cut divisions, however, but rather indicate the opera- tion of more than one system of distinction. Derek Brewer writes of three overlapping class systems, one based on rank or degree, one an antithesis between gentil/churl, which had moral as well as social overtones, and one functional, based on occupation.14 For Strohm, the three estates model is inadequate to cover the mixed social groups of the period.
The entrepreneurial nobleman and the knightly tradesman are regularly encountered, and one would be hard pressed to decide whether Chaucer and his fellow king’s knights and esquires belonged to a ‘retinue’ developed to grapple with the administrative problems of late feudalism or to a ‘bureau- cracy’ developed to deal with record keeping and exchange under emergent capitalism.15
The period in which the texts considered in this section were composed follows the uneven and complex transition from late feudalism to what was once called bastard feudalism, and to emergent capitalism. Almost every work of history once seemed to state that the period discussed was a time of great change. For the purposes of this section, what is impor- tant is that during the later fourteenth century, the period in which most of the texts considered in this section were written, English society was perceived as undergoing great change, and not only change but also ten- sion, conflict, violence, and factionalism. It is argued that a number of Middle English texts respond to the sense of social volatility in represen- tations of working-class, mercantile, or ruling-class characters, and in imaginary models of how stability could be re-established. The section 30 S. BYRNE begins with a short survey of expanding literacy, book production and book ownership in late medieval England, and the representation of the literate and illiterate during the period. It then examines the representa- tion of segments of late medieval society in a small sample of texts by a group of authors who lived during the reigns of Richard II (1377–1399) and Henry IV (1399–1413): John Gower (c.1330–1408), William Langland (c.1325–c.1390), Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400), and the Gawain Poet (flc .1375–1400); in a small number of anonymous com- plaints and other poems16 and in a small number of aristocratic and gen- try romances. These poems are not taken to be chronicles of events or mirrors of society. As Emily Steiner says of Piers Plowman, ‘they are less concerned with [contemporary] political conflict than with modelling political structure’,17 but the debates they stage about those structures may illustrate some contemporary anxieties and tensions, particularly those concerned with the increase of literacy and increase in resistance of different kinds among the lower gentry, lower mercantile, and labour- ing classes.
Literacy, Book Ownership, and the Representation of the ‘Illiterate’ Rebel The ability to read and the ability to have access to and to understand manuscripts, books, and other textual artefacts is one key determinant or concomitant of social status. Which sections of the population were able and which were permitted that ability and access is important, as are the attitudes to those who were and those who were not. Laurel Amtower suggests that in the earlier medieval period, books were associated with authorised and unquestionable meaning, and there- fore the church, so that the intellectual force of the theological or ‘autho- rised’ modes of reading and understanding cannot be underestimated.18 Amtower sees this exemplified by the mystification of the book in early medieval art, which distanced it from lay culture.
Illuminations of Christ enthroned, for example, typically depict Christ hold- ing an open book, the sign of the Logos. For the high Middle Ages before and during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the book was a metaphor for a higher sacramental and unchanging truth. It signified the world as Logos, the world according to God’s plan, unchallengeable and mythic, unintuitable by laymen unschooled in the mysteries of the church. […] 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 31
Images of books might be found accompanying the gospel writers […] angels, priests or even kings. Yet they seldom accompanied images of the layman. The book in high medieval culture represented an authority beyond challenge and beyond scrutiny and signified what Jesse Gellrich calls ‘as system of supernatural knowledge determined by the pre-existent assump- tion of the unity and totality—the eternal presence—of meaning’.19
This changes, however. Later manuscript illuminations become ‘inun- dated with images of not just books but of people reading the books’. Amtower suggests that when images of patrons appear in the books they have commissioned, and when books become ‘saturated with images of reading, we witness the materialization of a new cultural metaphor—read- ing as a mode of perception that enables new ways of thinking about both humanistic and ecclesiastical situations’.20 If the book was once a meta- phor for a sacramental and unchanging truth, it was also, however, some- thing much more unstable. In discussing religious and theological writing and book production, Alexandra Gillespie notes that the authority for Scripture and the Church Fathers’ writing was ‘ultimately divine’, but that the context for exegesis and transmission
was that of a post-lapsarian world. Scripture, and writings upon it, had to be copied out, commented on, glossed, compiled, corrected, and decorated by men, who were prone to error. The emergence of a complex ‘medieval the- ory of authorship’ which […] was most striking in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century writings of the Latin West, can be linked to problems created by the ‘composition, recomposition, and decomposition’ of God’s Word in the world.21
This is as true of humanity’s word in the world as of God’s. Strohm asserts that as late as the fourteenth century to read was to read aloud; that even reading alone entailed performance to an audience of one, and that silent reading was the exception rather than the rule.22 Bert Kimmelmann finds greater significance in private reading and private study of words, and argues that modern human society, the concept of modern civilisation, is defined by and dependent on widespread literacy.
Literacy changes how people reason. What literate people perceive—the meaning of it—is established by the visual word and their relationship to it; and the meaning of who they are, the meaning of their very humanity, has come to be determined by the fact that they are capable of interpreting 32 S. BYRNE
abstract signifiers. The picture ofhomo legens, indeed, is the quintessential image of modernity.23
The trope of reading was powerful because, ‘fundamentally, symbology is central to the Christian dispensation’,24 but crucially, during the later Middle Ages, reading came to be ‘the vehicle for self-realization and self- enunciation’. To read was not only to be empowered, but also to be dis- tinguished as a singular person possessing a unique point of view. This development, Kimmelmann argues, ‘anticipated the modern world’s priz- ing of individualism’.25 The evolution of the technologies of textual pro- duction ‘included nothing less than a transformation in the definitions of nature, human being, and otherwise reality’.26 This is perceptible in the uses made of the trope of reading that indicate how selfhood was under- stood in the fourteenth century, and how that idea of selfhood ‘was a formulation of individual autonomy that looked ahead to the modern concept of the ego’ in that ‘to read is to become oneself’.27 Kimmelmann refers to Brian Stock’s view that in Petrarch’s work the ‘relationships between reading, writing and the self’ are described in ‘unprecedented detail’, noting that for Petrarch, the reading of a book and the understanding of the self ‘became analogous intentional activities’.28 The development of informal cursive Gothic script, the improvement in spectacles, the move from manuscript to printed book were fostered by people engaging with written texts silently, ‘much like what was occurring in “devotional practice and the development of religious individualism”’.29 Reading became a more intimate activity, and intimacy ‘established an individual space in which communion of one sort or another could take place. Meditation came to mean “meditative reading”’. Kimmelmann quotes Taylor: ‘“Bookish-ness, piety and privacy were intimately con- nected”’30 and argues that in this reading process ‘the individual reader is recognized as such—an individual’.
Saenger notes that ‘psychologically, silent reading emboldened the reader because it placed the source of his curiosity completely under personal con- trol [and] private, visual reading and private contemplation encouraged individual critical thinking and contributed to the development of skepti- cism and intellectual heresy’.31
Thus perhaps Alistair Minnis’s assertion that ‘books in English were gen- erally coming under suspicion, due to fears prompted by the Wycliffite 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 33 heresy […] since the formal exegetical treatises that were produced were Wycliffite in origin or at least open to infiltration by Wycliffite ideas’ (see the discussion of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede, below).32 The reader is encouraged by some texts to be active in the production of meaning so that the text is not definitive and determinate:
For myne wordes, heere and every part, I speke hem alle under correccioun Of yow that felyng han in loves art, And putte it al in youre discrecioun To encresse or maken dymynucioun Of my langage, and that I yow biseche.33
Kimmelmann’s reader, then, can actively participate in the text, ‘given a semiotics that comprehends both textuality and corporeality. […] The autonomy of the reader is what is new in the fourteenth century’.34 This does not exclude the widespread practice of listening to rather than pri- vately, silently reading texts. The argument for the works of Gower and Chaucer to have been designed primarily for reading aloud is given by, for example, Joyce Coleman.35 The greater availability of copiers (particularly in London) of manuscripts, of cheaper editions, and of works borrowed, bequeathed, and sold second-hand, however, attested by the relatively large number of extant manuscripts and fragments of the works of authors, especially Langland and Chaucer, suggests that many readers were not exclusively reliant on being read to.36 The extent of literacy in the four- teenth century is well established by, among others, Moran,37 Orme,38 and Arlinghaus et al.39 Elementary education helped to feed the increased need for clergy and for secular clerks, and secondary education enabled some boys from the middle strata of the nonruling classes to become priests or schoolmasters or to attend university. In addition to formal, licensed schools, there also existed unlicensed, illicit teaching, as Lynn Arner describes: ‘Around the time of the English Rising of 1381, enough London law students were informally offering training […] to elicit a pro- hibition from the chancellor.’40 Both reading and acquisition of books became markers of prestige, both as expensive objets d’art and as ‘an emblem of that intangible sense of gentility and prestige with which the aristocracy sought to distinguish itself from the masses […] as tangible proof of the intellectual, aesthetic, and economic values of the aristocracy […] a symbol of high culture, arti- 34 S. BYRNE ficially endowing its owner with higher class status’.41 By appropriating book ownership, the third estate, which Amtower sees as having a ‘pro- pensity for self-fashioning’, claimed higher social status through the claim to high culture.
Indeed, it was the upwardly mobile members of the third estate who were responsible for creating a climate that necessitated the mass production of books facilitated by the printing press. Increased literacy, coupled with a disposable income and a growing cultural appreciation for reading and book ownership, generated an audience that demanded ever-increasing afford- ability in production techniques. Ironically, as aristocrats sought and com- missioned specialized texts, both for their reading pleasure and social prestige, these texts became available as copies and exemplars for others to own as well. The aristocracy drove the proliferation of texts, as others eagerly imitated what they bought and read.42
A grammar school education was likely to produce familiarity with a range of texts or extracts commonly used to teach Latin composition. Wendy Scase identifies a number of these, noting that it is not surprising to find vernacular authors such as Langland and his contemporaries quot- ing from or alluding to them.43 This meant that ‘learned poetry struc- tured by a Graeco-Roman and erudite European literary tradition’ was no longer the preserve of the ruling classes but ‘addressed members of the populace directly in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, and, as the Confessio testifies, offered a viable locus for intersect- ing with the consciousness of the subordinate classes’.44 This transmission ‘required a dissemination of cultural authority and offered a radically democratizing potential for assessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts’.45 The vernacular turn meant that ‘large portions of the nonruling classes no longer needed the more highly educated to dispense this knowledge or to interpret it for them’. Chaucer and Gower’s writings were ‘key conduits of these cultural riches into the language of the popu- lace’ and engaged in ‘elaborate processes of constructing cultural exper- tise and defining gradations of cultural authority’. These texts, at the ‘founding of a highly literate English tradition’ ‘attempted to circum- scribe the democratizing potential of this new knowledge and worked to grant certain socioeconomic groups leverage in public affairs, all the while promoting relations of dependency for others’. The classificatory systems in Chaucer’s and Gower’s poems, Arner argues, encouraged the reader- ship to make social distinctions both among groups of readers and 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 35
‘between those groups and those not among them’. They played a part in determining who could ‘legitimately contribute to the production of knowledge in medieval England […] and which conversations about lit- erature were possible’.46 Amtower gives examples showing that book ownership as well as liter- acy was within the economic reach of the ‘working middle class’ in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are records of merchants com- missioning works as well as bequeathing books; for example, in 1420, Johannes Brynchele, a tailor of London, bequeathed a copy of The Canterbury Tales. ‘Goldsmiths, chandlers, lawyers, scribes, merchants, fishmongers and even a farmer are listed in Cavanaugh’s inventory as bequeathing books between the years 1300 and 1450.’47 Amtower refers to the inventory of two bankrupt grocers in the 1390s which estimated the worth of four romances in their possession at 11s 4d, whilst two English books were valued at 8d and a primer at 8d. Statistics for owner- ship and readership of cheaper, especially unbound, books such as ver- nacular romances are more difficult to amass, as less expensive, less durable books were less likely to survive. Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon gives a good sense of the pleasure of owning and sensuously experiencing the material artefact as well as the pleasure of reading texts, as expressed by a fourteenth-century collector who, as sometime chancellor, tutor to the future Edward III and bishop, could acquire many books.48 De Bury’s prologue clears him of the charge of excess in his acquisition by asserting that his aim is to benefit men intel- lectually gifted but poor, who without help might be lost to the Church.49 He writes of books as repositories of the wisdom and guidance of God as well as of humankind.
Certes, thou hast placed thy tabernacle in books, where the Most High, the Light of lights, the Book of Life, has established thee. There everyone who asks receiveth thee, and everyone who seeks finds thee, and to everyone that knocketh boldly it is speedily opened. Therein the cherubim spread out their wings, that the intellect of the students may ascend and look from pole to pole, from the east and west, from the north and from the south. Therein the mighty and incomprehensible God Himself is apprehensibly contained and worshipped; therein is revealed the nature of things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal; therein are discerned the laws by which every state is adminis- tered, the offices of the celestial hierarchy are distinguished, and the tyran- nies of demons described, such as neither the ideas of Plato transcend, nor the chair of Crato contained.50 36 S. BYRNE
Little or no thought should be given to the price:
[N]o dearness of price ought to hinder a man from the buying of books, if he has the money that is demanded for them, unless it be to withstand the malice of the seller or to await a more favourable opportunity of buying. For if it is wisdom only that makes the price of books, which is an infinite treasure to mankind, and if the value of books is unspeakable, as the premises show, how shall the bargain be shown to be dear where an infinite good is being bought?51
If the ownership of literary works, or reference to them, carried cultural capital, display of books as expensive artefacts and display of ill- or partially informed knowledge could bring derision. The ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales, for example, notes that the Clerk of Oxenford likes his books ‘clad in blak or reed’, perhaps hinting the outward appearance of the artefact is more important than the text inside (I, ll.294). Whilst the spread of vernacular literature and the improved production technology increased the number of consumers of writing, particularly in the gentry and better-off merchant and clerical groups, at the same time those socially and economically beneath these groups were represented as illiterate subhumans who either could not appreciate literature or hated learning and wanted to destroy all forms of writing. According to Henry Knighton, Wycliff’s translation of the Gospel
made that common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be for literate and perceptive clerks, and spread the Evangelists’ pearls to be trampled by swine.52
This attitude to the non-legens is most clearly depicted in representations of the risings of 1381. Although this study is mostly confined to works in English, an exception is made in the case of John Gower’s Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme (c.1376–1379) and Latin Vox Clamantis (c.1377– 1381), used here as examples of the articulation of the case of the higher classes, the cultured literati, against the allegedly illiterate and uncultured lower classes, and which, as the colophon to the English Confessio Amantis attests, gave an account of unrest and violence in the reign of Richard II.
Secundus enim liber sermone latino metrice compositus tractat de variis infortuniis tempore Regis Ricardi Secundi in Anglia contingentibus. Vnde non solum regni proceres et communes tormeta passi sunt, set et ipse crude- lissimus rex suis ex demeritis ab alto corruens in foueam quam fecit finaliter proiectus est. Nomenque voluminis huius Vox Clamantis intitulatur.53 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 37
[The second book, metrically composed in the Latin language, deals with the various misadventures occurring in the time of King Richard II. Whereby not only the nobles and the commons of the kingdom suffered torments, but even this most cruel king himself, by his own shortcomings falling from on high, was at last thrown into the deep pit that he had made. This volume is entitled the Vox Clamantis.]
Gower’s reference in the title to John the Baptist (quoting Isaiah) cry- ing out in the desert is indicative of the author’s assumption of the role of the prophet. ‘Moral’ Gower, as Chaucer names him at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (c.1382–1385) (V, l.1856–1859), often issues his moral pronouncements as from the communal voice. In the Vox Clamantis he ‘cries out’, or ‘clamours’, for the people: ‘Hoc ego quod plebis vox clamat clamo’ (VI, l.15), and refers to ‘Vox populi’ (III, l.1267) and ‘plebis/Vox’ (III, prologue, ll.11–12)54; in Confessio Amantis (c.1386–1390), there is a reference to the ‘comun vois, which mai noght lie’ (Prologue, l.124); and in the Mirour de l‘Omme, the ‘com- mune tesmoignance [testimony/consensus]/ Du people’ (ll.21776– 21777).55 That communal voice is alluded to as though it has the weight of authority,56 but is distanced from a large segment of those for whom it ostensibly speaks, even in trilingual England at the time, by virtue of being in Latin (but see later). In the Mirour, the discontent of the lower orders is a ‘nettle’ which the nobles in their lethargic sleepiness have failed to grasp, and which ‘will sting us before it can be brought to justice’.
Me semble que la litargie Ad endormi la seignourie, Si qu’ils de la commune gent Ne pernont garde a la folie, Ainz souffront croistre celle urtie Quelle est du soy trop violent, Cil qui pourvoit le temps present Se puet doubter procheinement, [….] Avant ce q’om la justefie. (ll.26485–26496)
The actions of the peasants who demand higher wages and the right to mobility are compared to floods and raging fires and cannot be stopped ‘by either reason or discipline’. 38 S. BYRNE
Trois choses sont d’une covyne, Qui sanz mercy font la ravine En cas q’ils soient au dessus: L’un est de l’eaue la cretine, L’autre est du flame la ravine, Et la tierce est des gens menuz La multitude q’est commuz: Car ja ne serront arrestuz Par resoun ne par discipline. (ll.26497–26508)
Artisans, merchants, innkeepers, and shopkeepers are all accused of fraud brought about by greed (ll.25501–26424), but labourers of disrupting the natural order and turning the world upside down. The narrator laments that
Ly labourer qui sont truant Voiont le siecle busoignant De leur service et leur labour, Et que poy sont le remenant, Pour ce s’en vont en orguillant; Ne font sicome leur ancessour, Car j’ay bien mesmes veu le jour, Q’au servir souffrirent plusour Qui font danger du meintenant. Mais certes c’est un grant errour Veoir l’estat superiour El danger d’un vilein estant. (ll.26473–26484)
[These truant labourers see the times much in need of their services and labour, and because there are so few remaining, they are arrogant. They do not behave at all like their ancestors, for I myself saw the day when many submitted to service who are unwilling now. But certainly it is a great wrong to see the superior estate in the power of the villeins.]
The use of the ‘villein’ is significant here in that in English the term, derived from the Latin for someone who worked the lands of a villa, ini- tially indicated occupation, but became a term denoting rank, and accrued pejorative meaning related to morals. The OED shows the devel- opment from
[o]ne of the class of serfs in the feudal system; spec. a peasant occupier or cultivator entirely subject to a lord (villein in gross gross n.4 2e) or attached 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 39
to a manor (villein regardant regardant adj. 1); a tenant in villeinage; also applied to a person regarded as holding a similar position in other communi- ties, a bondsman. †Hence formerly in general use, a peasant, country labourer, or low-born rustic to
[o]riginally, a low-born base-minded rustic; a man of ignoble ideas or instincts; in later use, an unprincipled or depraved scoundrel; a man natu- rally disposed to base or criminal actions, or deeply involved in the commis- sion of disgraceful crimes a. Used as a term of opprobrious address. In the Vox’s body politic, in a reference to Daniel 2:32–45, the peasants are the earthen foot working against the golden head:
Torpescunt proceres, clerus dissoluitur, vrbes Discordant, leges sunt sine iure graues: Murmurat indomitus vulgus, concrescit abvsus Peccati solitus; sic dolet omnis humus. Hinc puto quod seuit pes terreus in caput auri. (VII, ll.1375–1379)
[The rulers are slothful, the clergy dissolute, cities full of discord, laws with- out serious justice: the untameable mob complaining, abuses worsening, wrong-doing becoming normal; so grieved are all men. For this reason I believe that the foot of earth rages on the head of gold.]
Gower’s writing follows the traditional division of society into three estates: the clergy, who pray for all and give moral example to others; the knightly orders, who fight for all and rule; and the peasants, labourers, and townsmen, who work to provide food for all; but it distinguishes between secular clergy and ‘regulars’ (nuns, monks, canons, friars), adds ministers of law, and ranks the king as above and apart from the second estate. Excluded from this are those not belonging to any mystery (craft) or regu- lar waged labour—the unwaged poor. The estates satires of Vox Clamantis Books II–VII, which predate the first part of the work, identify corruption in all of the estates, but nonetheless do not challenge the existence of a divinely ordained social hierarchy. In Book I, the ‘Visio’, added after the risings of 1381,57 the allegory becomes particularly damning of the com- mon people in the shape of the rebels who have threatened that social order. Following a long tradition of representations of peasants as repul- 40 S. BYRNE sive and bestial, they are shown as brute beasts with no voice but animal grunting whose ambition is to create a world laid waste, without educa- tion or law.58
Hec est gens racione carens vt bestia, namque Non amat hec hominem, nec putat esse deum. (V, l.651–1.652)
[This is a people without reason like beasts, neither loving humankind nor believing in the existence of God.]
As Novak states, the voices allegedly ‘of the people’ unite in Gower’s writing to clamour for social harmony through top-down governance which would assure the maintenance of the divinely ordained social structure.
No one is fulfilling his divinely ordained role in society; the kings are either doddering or infantile, unable to reason for themselves, their counselors corrupt, the clergy worldly, the nobility helpless, and the peasants lazy. […] [I]n the ‘Visio’ […] one group begins to sing off-key: the peasantry, who launch a discordant war cry against the other estates. […] ‘The common people’ is no longer a general term for the whole nation. They become more concretely agricultural laborers, serfs, and Gower speaks not of their suffer- ing but rather of their wickedness.59
The voice of the ‘Visio’ is not that of ‘the people’. The conventional form of a dream vision enables Gower to combine a chronicle (though he did not witness the revolts) with fantasy, presented as prophecy. The dreamer sees
the curse of God strike bands of peasants, who are all transformed into domestic and wild animals, such as donkeys, pigs, poultry, dogs and flies […] and then descend upon London. They leave their cozy heaps of dung— a number of the groups of animals are described as sleeping contentedly in their own filth […] before they leave it to join the crowd. The morphed animals deviate from their nature: the newly-formed pigs are like wild boars, the dogs like wolves, the chickens like vultures and so forth. Thanks to this dream device, Gower can give free range to hyperbole and has no obliga- tions to fact or even to verisimilitude: rivers flowing with blood, Gog and Magog, the race of Cain, Cerberus and Ulysses’s former companions all join in the peasants’ march.60 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 41
No longer the harmonising chorus blended into one voice, the voices of the people have become babbling in a Babel.
Quidam sternutant asinorum more ferino, Mugitus quidam personuere boum; Quidam porcorum grunnitus horridiores Emittunt, que suo murmure terra tremit (I, ll.799–802)
[Some of them sneeze in the beastly manner of asses, some make the low- ings of cattle; some emit the horrible grunting of pigs, so that the earth trembles from their rumbling.]
Rather than being like animals and emitting animal noises, the rebels become animals, and a monster.
Mille lupi mixtique lupis vrsi gradientes A siluis statuunt vrbis adire domos: Non erat in terris monstrosum quicquid abortum, Seu genus, vnde furor ledere posset humum, Quin venit et creuit, spersus velut imber ab austro, [….]
Tunc in aperta loca que monstra prius latuerunt Accedunt, paribus suntque recepta suis: Belua vasta, ferox, siluis que palustribus exit, Qui tantum rabie non furit, immo fame. (I, ll.883–892)
[A thousand wolves and bears coming with the wolves determined to leave the woods for the homes of the town. No monstrous thing, no species of the Earth whose fury might harm the land but came out and multiplied. […] Then monsters which before were in hiding came into the open and were received by their kind. The fierce and mighty beast which used to rage from hunger rather than fury came out of the woods and marshes.]
This trope also appears in contemporary chronicles such as the Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, in which the Essex rebels are described as sending up
a devilish yelling […] not like the usual shouts of men but worse than any human cries and beyond any imagining. The nearest comparison would be with the shrieks of the inhabitants of hell. […] [T]hey yelled in this way 42 S. BYRNE
whenever they executed anybody or destroyed houses. No words could be distinguished amid the horrific noise. Their throats were filled with many different kinds of bellowing, or, more accurately, with the devilish cries of peacocks.61
The Westminster Chronicle refers to the rebels of Essex and Kent as ‘the maddest of mad dogs’. In this account, they do speak, but their cry ‘A revel!’ suggests that they see destruction and mayhem as festivity.62 In the Confessio Gower reminds the reader that the actual Tower of Babel came about through sin, whose history he traces in the Prologue. After the Flood, when Noah’s fellowship is saved by the Ark,
And over that thurgh Senne it com That Nembrot such emprise nom, When he the Tour Babel on heihte Let make, as he that wolde feihte Ayein the hihe goddes myht. (Prologue, ll.1017–1021)
The resulting division of language is associated with sin, the ‘mother of division’.
Wherof divided anon ryht Was the langage in such entente, Ther wiste non what other mente, So that thei myhten noght procede. An thus it stant of every dede, Wher Senne takth the cause on honde, It may upriht noght longe stonde; For Senne of his condicioun Is moder of division. (Prologue, ll.1022–1030)
In moving between Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English in his writings, Gower in a way exemplifies the disunity of humanity in the diversity of discourses, but equally he could be writing to the segment of society which was trilingual. His vernacular works could not claim to be comprehensible even to all English speakers of the time, because more people could have been literate in Latin than in English (see below). The Vox could be seen as exploiting the function of Latin as a lingua franca which unified at least the educated strata of Europe, but also excluded the masses who couldn’t read or speak the language. To write in Latin of those who lose articulacy 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 43 even in English and instead rage and shout and grunt perhaps emphasises the distance between the author and the rebels, and between the ‘us’ of the reader and representer and the ‘them’ of the represented. Perhaps the Latin introductory verses and glosses on the English text of the Confessio, the ‘bok for Engelondes sake’ (Prologue, l.24), mitigate any sense of the declassé in the vernacular, which Gower has employed in order to make his work ‘stant betwene ernest and game’ (VIII, l. 3109) and emphasise the message of the closing of the work, that the present evils of the land could and should be solved by the king and ‘knyghthode’ (VIII, l.3021). In chronicles, the rebels of various counties, towns, and cities are described as rustici, a term almost synonymous with nativi or bondi,63 denoting the status of bond peasant, or as vilissimi rustici (lowest of peas- ants), discaligati (shoeless), vilissimae conditionis servi (meanest of servile conditions), or ‘non solum rusticos, sed rusticorum abjectissimos’ (not just peasants but the most abject of peasants).64 The Westminster chronicler has an entry for ‘Ignobilis turba rusticorum surrexit’65 (Rising of the peas- ant rabble), homogenising a broad social spread, from bond labourers to artisans, shopkeepers, freeholders, clerics, and gentry, and further attribut- ing to them ignorant, purposeless acts of wanton destruction.66 Though the Vox depicts the rebels in their savage rage swearing to throw down all law:
Agresti furia iurat siluestris, vt vno Legibus excussis iura furore ruent: Tantus adest numerus seruorum perdicionis, Cingere quod murus vix valet vllus eos. (I, ll.895–898)
[With savage rage in the woods they swore that they would trample justice, overthrowing all laws in a mad frenzy. So great was the number of these slaves of erdition that walls could hardly contain them.]
Christopher Dyer, however, asserts that it would be ‘a grave error to allege that the rebels were behaving lawlessly; rather they were establishing a new law’.67 They constantly asserted their allegiance to the king they saw as ill- advised and served by corrupt officials, and their intent to take back that which was theirs. At times at least they were strictly self-disciplined, as even the Westminister Chronicle reports, noting that during the sack of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, no one dared to steal any of the valuables for themselves for fear of punishment by beheading.68 Thomas Walsingham 44 S. BYRNE also states that the Essex rebels ‘bought everything at a fair price, and, if they discovered one of their number thieving, they executed him, like men who had a special horror of thieves’. His account of the sack of the Savoy states that the rebels wanted it to be clear that they were not acting out of greed, so ‘no one on pain of death’ should keep any of the treasures taken. Instead, they smashed things with axes, trampled them underfoot, or threw them in the Thames or sewers, and ground up jewellery in a mortar.69 The ‘voice of the people’, then, authoritative, learned in Latin and French as well as English, and recorded for posterity by literacy, is not that of the common people, who are mostly silenced. If, as Novak states, by ‘people’ the Vox refers to nobles, the clergy, and parliament,70 then the lower orders are excluded from that category; they are not ‘people’, not human. These were not likely to be the readership of the Vox, even though literacy in the sense defined by Richardson was widespread among the artisan and merchant classes in the period. Ian Frederick Moulton notes that in English, ‘“literate” is a late medi- eval term’ which ‘first appears in texts from the 1450s’. It refers
generally to a familiarity with letters and the cultural sophistication such familiarity is supposed to impart. Like the Latin ‘litteratus,’ it is almost a synonym for ‘educated,’ or ‘cultured.’ The narrower definition, ‘able to read and write’ dates only from the late nineteenth century. This is also the period when the abstract term ‘literacy’ is coined—a back-formation, inci- dentally, from ‘illiteracy’.71
The earliest recorded use of the term ‘lettred’ appears from c.1380, in the Wycliffite Bible as a translation of litteratus. Malcolm Richardson expands the meaning of literacy in the Middle Ages from being fluent in reading and writing Latin or English to the ability to understand and interact with ‘pragmatic, non-literary writing’,72 the documents of medieval bureau- cracy and daily life. He points out that the point at which merchants and craftsmen ‘began writing with their own pens (mainly after c.1420) is less important than is their pre-existing familiarity with the culture of writing’, which he dates to the thirteenth century.73 In providing the fictional example of a young Norfolk man, ‘Jankyn Revelour’, he lists some of the documents which Jankyn would have encountered as an apprentice tallow- chandler in 1322: a written testimonial of good character; the record of the apprenticeship agreement lodged at the Guildhall; some craft guild records; proclamations; his own later enrolment of apprentices; records of 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 45 credit and debt; deeds and property transactions recorded at the Court of Hustings; petitions to the mayor and aldermen against encroachment on his business, or to prove that he should be exempt from customs duties; safe conducts for travelling on business; petitions to the city for his guild to be recognised and to the king for its incorporation into a city company; correspondence with shipping agents, and so on. Ultimately, ‘he will have a member of the Mistery of Writers of the Court Letter draw up and wit- ness his will and enrol it at the Court of Husting, hoping that his widow will not later have to go to the same scrivener to write a petition to the city to settle his bequests. And yet, we were told for generations that this man is an “illiterate”’.74 Since many of the documents encountered by Jankyn would have been in Latin, there is an argument suggesting that he could have been at least semi-literate in that language rather than or before he was in written English. Who among readers in the laity was empowered, autonomous, and considered entitled to or able to generate text of more than local signifi- cance, who was homo legens, was, however, restricted. Stephen Justice dis- cusses some short discourses said to have been the words of participants in the 1381 revolts, five from the chronicle of Henry Knighton75 and one from the chronicle of Thomas Walsingham.76 He notes that Knighton and Walsingham assume that the words ascribed to the cleric John Ball are from a letter whereas the words of the other men (whom, based on their surnames, Justice takes to be rural labourers) are assumed to be transcrip- tions of speech. Subsequent historians have followed this, assuming that John Ball was the author of all the statements but Justice’s analysis of the extracts indicates that they did not come from the same hand, originator, or copier, ‘because they did not issue from the same dialect’.77 ‘The priest writes and the rural laity speak; it is the way of the world. The certainty that writing was what clerks did amounted in medieval England to what Kenneth Burke has called a “psychosis”—a systematic blindness produc- tive of institutional stamina.’78 This ‘tallies too well with the story that chroniclers and royal justices wanted to tell. Lee Patterson has recently observed that monastic chroniclers deny the rebels the marks even of fun- damental human reasonability’.79 We might think of the priest’s surprise that Piers the Plowman can read (William Langland, Piers Plowman, c.1365–1388, Passus VII; discussed below). Justice continues:
In the imaginative lexicon of the chroniclers, as of medieval latinity in gen- eral, the embodiment par excellence of reason is writing, and their narratives 46 S. BYRNE
of the rising are black fantasias about the victimization of written culture and its agents at the hands of those who could not coherently speak (much less think or write) and who could look at writing only with a rage for its destruction.80
In keeping with this, Walsingham describes the rebels’ violence as an attack on writing and learning. He begins by saying that the peasants are ‘having hopes of subjecting all things to their stupidity’.81 Further into the account, he goes on:
They compelled teachers in the grammar schools to swear that they would never any more instruct the young in that subject. […] They were zealous in consigning old records to the flames. And to make it impossible for any- one to be found again who in the future had the ability or the knowledge to write down things old or new, they murdered likely candidates. It was dan- gerous to be recognised as a priest, but much more dangerous if you were found with an inkpot by your side. Such people rarely or never escaped the rebels’ hands.82
In fact, the rebels’ main targets were tax collectors and the commissioners and others who imposed fines for infraction of the labour laws, whether Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Sir John Cavendish, or local justices, and the documents they set out to destroy were the records which enabled taxes and fines to be imposed and which tied them to particular manors and service. Therefore, they were able to identify these. Like Richardson, Justice highlights the folly of regarding either the rebels or the lower classes as a whole as illiterate. He may be reacting to remarks such as Janet Coleman’s that the authors of poems such as the antifraternal Pierce the Plowman’s Crede83 or the earlier ‘Song of the Husbandman’ (c.1297)84 came from the ‘lower echelons of the middle class’ and ‘a clerk with “peas- ant” farmer sympathies’, since ‘in so far as the lower class—the third estate—was the least literate, whatever poetry expressed their needs and complaints had only an oral existence’.85 The importance of reading or being read to in matters political and social is evidenced by the existence of broadsides which were often posted at strategic public places during this period.
The vernacular broadside embodied a claim as well as a message: merely by existing, it asserted, tendentiously or not, that those who read only English— or even could only have English read to them—had a stake in the intellectual 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 47
and political life of church and realm. Wyclif’s followers used the medium deliberately to create just this impression. [… They] also occasioned impres- sively detailed documentation of the possibilities of vernacular literacy—the ability to write as well as to read—below the level of the landowner and prosperous bourgeois.86
We might see in Piers Plowman’s wayfairer, minstrel, and personification of active life, Haukyn, a growing confidence in the right to demand the chance to understand pronouncements from on high. ‘I can nouʒt con- strue al this […] ʒe moste kenne me this on Englisch’ (XIV l.276). Richardson agrees that the existence of broadsides indicates a wide- spread belief in the ability of people to read them, but warns, however, that the authors of broadsides did not always represent the assumed vox populi, but could be from a narrow political interest or the middle or rul- ing class.87 Other evidence for literacy among the middle classes includes a well-documented case of a non-academic autodidact Lollard, William Smith of Leicester, who taught himself to read and write. ‘Under examina- tion by Archbishop Courtenay, Smith “handed over weighty books [libros solemnes] which he had written in the mother tongue, from the Gospels and from the epistles and bishops and doctors of the church, and which (he confessed) he had worked studiously at writing for eight years”.88 Justice writes that if writing was a socially charged symbol of freedom, the use of charters and other records conferred the experience and posses- sion of the symbol, and the desire to make the symbol actual: ‘free status was what the 1381 rising (pro libertate) was all about.89 The motive for the writing and copying of the rebel letters lay chiefly not in their contents but in the activity of their production: they made their most important claim merely by being written documents that came (or claimed to come) from the hands of rustici’. This evidence for rural literacy is mustered ‘not to assert that the rebels were more or less literate, but that literacy was something confidently pos- sessed by some or a few of them, less confidently perhaps by a few more, and available, by one means or another, to almost all’. The letters that were declared to be speeches by Knighton ‘announced the documentary competence of the insurgent population, a determination not to be excluded from documentary rule’. However much of a fact this lower-class literacy was, it was nonetheless not part of the official order. The institu- tional ‘psychosis’ described by Justice, ‘that sorted literacy with social rank made social “fact” into social norm: the restriction of reading and writing 48 S. BYRNE to the governing classes of church, state, and manor was articulated as a principle of order’.90 This resistance to and condemnation of the idea of the spread of literacy among the labouring laity is echoed by Gower, who reviles John Ball:
Ball was the preacher, the prophet and teacher, inspired by a spirit of hell, And every fool advanced in his school, to be taught as the devil thought well.91
In the Confessio Amantis, Ball’s famous couplet is turned on its head as the narrator condemns the literate but ignorant:
It were betre dike and delve And stonde upon the ryhte feith, Than knowe al that the bible seith And erre as somme clerkes do. (Prologue, ll. 352–355)
Taken as axiomatic was that it is ‘in the nature of clerici that they should write and of rural workers that they should not’, and this distinction deter- mined who might take a part in cultural and political reflection.
Lords and freeholders possessed the artificial public memory of the cartula- ries and archives; clerics and educated nobles were free to reflect upon, not just practice, belief and ritual. The exclusion from writing of villeins and smallholders confirmed both their unfreedom and the rightness of it. And in the years just before 1381, the psychosis had become topical for the coun- tryside, where a break with legal custom enforced the association of unfree- dom and illiteracy in a matter of close concern to the rebels of 1381.92
Broadsides gave the class of villeins and smallholders the opportunity to assert publicly their grievances, and to demonstrate their literacy. One example, The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, was pinned to the door of Westminster Hall in 1395.
We pore men, tresoreris of Cryst and his apostlis, denuncyn to þe lordis and þe comunys of þe parlement certain conclusionis and treuthis for þe refor- maciun of holi chirche of Yngelond, þe qwiche haþ ben blynde and leprouse many ʒere be meyntenaunce of þe proude prelacye, born up with flatringe of priuate religion, þe qwich is multiplied to a gret charge and onerous to puple her in Yngelonde.93 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 49
Justice asserts that the first and most important declaration of the texts he analyses, which themselves were probably first presented as posted broad- sides, ‘resided simply in the gesture of writing and publication, in the vis- ible and public declaration that laici and bondi had begun to occupy the cultural terrain of economic and intellectual privilege’.94 It is significant that the rebels’ book-burning was not indiscriminate or an attack against literacy per se. Justice notes that wherever they burned documents, they did so with a specificity that shows their familiarity and competence with the forms of literate culture. The ‘insurgent animus against the archive was not the revenge of a residually oral culture against the appurtenances of a literacy that was threatening because [it was] alien and mysterious. Both chronicles and indictments bespeak a precise target- ing of legal instruments’.95 A ‘self-conscious proclamation of the political significance of literacy’ is made when the narrator of a poem discussed below, Mum and the Sothsegger (c.1409), produces a bag of books as testament to the corrup- tion of churchmen and laity of all classes, demonstrating that those below the upper or ruling classes could now both record injustice and deploy the evidence of it.96 The power of the written word as legal record and testi- mony, and fear of the impact of such writing becoming accessible to the lower orders can also be seen in attempts by unfree manorial tenants to prove that they were exempt from the services due by bound serfs by obtaining ‘exemplifications’, copies of entries in the Domesday Book relat- ing to their villages, and thus showing that they were free tenants of the crown.97 A petition against this was laid in 1377 and the attempts were quashed by royal justices and commissioners who imprisoned the tenants and protected the rights of the lords against ‘disinheritance’. As Richardson warns, however, though some groups were ‘outraged at the abuses made possible by certain documents’, the utility of the written word was increas- ingly acknowledged.98 In spite of fears of the spread of Lollard writing, vernacular literature persisted. Paul Strohm, Anne Middleton, and others identify the readership of Gower and Chaucer as primarily the proto-bourgeoisie, gentry, and nobil- ity,99 but Lynn Arner proposes a more complex classification and a wider readership among her category of the ‘nonruling classes’. In the aftermath of the insurrection, she writes, a ‘new, highly literary poetry spoke to sub- ordinate classes’.100 She argues that in spite of records of their book own- ership and extensive documentation of the consumption of English texts prior to 1425, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, ‘lesser mer- 50 S. BYRNE chants and prosperous artisans’, have been overlooked as readers by liter- ary scholars, and it is important to make these readers visible. She, like Justice, identifies a number of men from the nonruling classes who bequeathed books between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centu- ries, and argues that a significant portion of those strata owned and con- sumed books.101 These are among the readers whom she identifies as producing ‘substantial numbers of participants in the 1381 insurrections’, and who hence ‘provide us with concrete examples of rebels and rebel- sympathizers addressed by Chaucer’s and Gower’s vernacular poetry’.102 Her classification includes artisans and retailers, prosperous shopkeepers, master craftsmen, and other leading members of the lesser companies, including workers who were artisans, apprentices, and journeymen. It does not include servants or waged labourers, ‘for although some of these ranks may have been among Chaucer’s and Gower’s audiences, we have less evidence that they were literate than those higher in the guilds’.103 It also excludes Chaucer and Gower themselves, whom she categorises as belonging to the ruling classes.104 Whether we refer to this class as gentry, lower gentry, nonruling class, or by any other term, some of its members were clearly literate, and some were owners of books. For Johnston, who uses the term ‘gentry’, this expanding estate or degree, comprised of knight, esquire, and gentil, had the most evident effect, and the maximum effect on the genre of Romance. Romance might seem to be squarely aimed at and to receive patronage from the upper classes, the first estate, since it reflects their interests and depicts them, or at least idealised versions of themselves. By the late four- teenth century, however, both the genre and the aristocracy and gentry had changed significantly.105 The increasing gentry106 ‘had unique socioeconomic concerns—concerns that inform the romances they were reading and sharing with one another, concerns inflected in their litera- ture’.107 The gentry became consumers of texts once primarily associated with the nobility.
The Anglo-Norman Brut, for example, began its life as a text predominantly read and owned by the nobility; however, by the later Middle Ages, a signifi- cant number of mercantile and gentry owners of the English prose transla- tion can be found. Furthermore, ‘home-made’ miscellanies, many of which contain romances […] often arose in the households of the gentry. We also know that a number of didactic treatises circulated among the gentry in this period.108 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 51
Johnston also cites the Paston letters as evidence of book ownership and knowledge of literary texts, including The Canterbury Tales and the Parliament of Fowls.109 John Paston’s 1470 inventory of books is a good index of his taste and perhaps that of the gentry class to which he belonged, and in particular, perhaps an indicator of an interest in Arthurian Romances, seen as an indicator of social and political ambition by Sean Pollack, and discussed below.110
Literary Representations of Social Class and Social Inequality The existence of the middle strata of medieval society, from the upper peasant to the higher grades of the guilds system and the less well-off gen- try, some gentil, some not, highlights the inadequacy of the three estates model, even if we consider work in retail as labour. Moving from the dis- cussion of this class as patrons and readers of books, it is important to consider the representation of an important segment of the class, mer- chants, in literary texts. They, ‘[p]owerful commoners in an age of aristo- crats, international operators in an age of dangerous travel, city-dwellers within a predominantly rural population’, are described paradoxically in medieval society as a group which ‘wielded power and influence far in advance of their social status’.111 It is not surprising to find them satirised and vilified in medieval writing. The theoretical prohibition by the church of profit, particularly the profits of the wealthier merchants who invested money and loaned cash at interest, marked them as already morally dubious, though necessary, and aligned them with Jewish financiers who suffered so much during the Middle Ages. During the risings of 1381, however, they seem not to have been targeted, though members of the upper reaches of the group aligned themselves with the nobles. The man who killed Wat Tyler, the Mayor of London, William Walworth, was knighted together with other wealthy merchants and guildsmen, including Nicholas Brembre and John Philpot, for their support of the king during the risings.112 One way of mitigating or making restitution for the sin of usury or the less sinful but morally dubious making of profits through, for example, bills of exchange, was charity. Ladd shows that merchants regularly made charitable donations or supported foundations such as hospitals, individually and through guilds.113 He also makes the point that although the Church frowned on 52 S. BYRNE mercantile practice, the Church itself ‘dominated the agricultural econ- omy [… and] played a powerful role in the money economy’.114 Money had developed to be the ‘life blood’ as ‘agriculture generally became organised for the market economy’.115 Church teaching in the mid- and later Middle Ages sanctioned ‘just price’ and fair dealing, making trade and business loans charging moderate interest respectable, but Ladd observes that the problem with the just price was that it allowed any price to be challenged as not just, and could justify any shift in price.116 Antimercantile feeling was not founded on the concept of greed alone but, in the earlier period, was part of a larger distrust of money, or the money economy. Specie was seen as ‘an instrument of exchange that had devil-like, magical powers of luring people and then of corrupting them’, of engendering avarice.117 Grotesque frescoes and other representations of the avaricious and the punishment that awaited them remained visible in church architecture during the later period.118 These visual lessons, in con- flict with the later teachings, would have remained, and perhaps reinforced the ambivalence of attitudes to mercantilism. The merchant, dependent on a supply vulnerable to many contingen- cies, and a possibly fluctuating demand, and as likely to fall to ruin as to rise socially, is likely to be represented as a potentially destabilising ele- ment in texts whose ideal is a conservative and settled tripartite society. In homiletic religious texts, the merchant is at best a representative of the material world which the text enjoins the reader to reject, treading a thin line between acceptable profit and usury and at worst a damned embodi- ment of covetousness and corruption, but he or she could equally be both. The double vision of merchants as both ‘at the heart of fourteenth- century society’ and ‘condemned’ by Christ’s precedent is matched by the reality of their so often financing both church and king yet being constantly suspected of usurious practices.119 As Ladd notes, it isn’t until the following century that the established custom of merchant bequests to charity fully enters the literary imagination so that mercantile charity becomes a familiar trope in fifteenth-century poetry and drama.120 In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, judgements are contingent on actions and Biblical sanction for honest trade is cited in ‘The Parson’s Tale’. The pilgrim Merchant himself, a characterisation about which there has been much disagreement,121 seems to embody ambivalence. Piers Plowman (c.1365–1388), however, is unequivocal in its representation of the mer- chant class in Coveitise, a fraud and a cheat of both ordinary people and the Church. Piers the Plowman is not from the middle strata of medieval 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 53 society but from the waged labouring classes. Whilst he may not be of the very lowest stratum, even as a skilled ploughman and the renter of a half- acre plot of land, he is a peasant and possibly a bond labourer. He embod- ies social distinctions in terms of the poverty of the labourer, manifest corporeally in his patched coat and mittens (Passus VI, ll.59–60).122 In keeping with his humility, the alliterative lines are in an undecorated style. In Passus XIX (ll.13–15), however, when he appears to the dreamer cov- ered in blood, after the joust with the devil, he/Christ is described by Conscience in the register of the armigerous class, with a heraldic blazon, and the followers of Christ are said to have been promoted to the status of franklin (i.e. the highest rank of freeholder below knight. Saul shows that franklins used seals in, for example, boundary agreements and charters, but were not armigerous123). Here, the reward for a good life based on a Christian conscience is modelled on secular hierarchy. Piers is not a rebel, he speaks for the status quo or at least the idealised version of the status quo, the three estates fulfilling their respective obligations and responsi- bilities. Nonetheless, he regards all men as of one blood, and affirms that even the king should rule by reason and conscience, should not be a tyrant, and should not oppress the people. A series of measures by Ordinance124 and Statute125 in the reign of Edward III, following the reduction of the labour force by the plagues, attempted to prevent labourers from leaving or being enticed away from their native manors. Workers were prohibited from travelling in search of better pay or conditions and employers were forbidden to entice them with higher wages than had been paid in 1346 or the preceding five to six years, that is, the wages from the time before the worst of the plagues, when labour was not scarce and in demand. At the same time, merchants were ordered to choose and keep to one kind of merchandise, and artisans were ordered to choose and keep to one craft. Whilst not overtly criticising these measures, Piers Plowman allows voices of dissent to be heard: Dame Study in Passus X, on the wicked owning the wealth of the world, and the corruption and shady dealings in council; Honest Fidelity in Passus XI, on the right of ordinary people to speak out. Piers himself, a humble labourer not in orders, is towards the end of the visions shown as St Peter, as Christ, and as an authority over priests and bishops (Passus XX). Yet Patience in Passus XIV seems to condemn the wealthy but, borrowing from Vincent of Beauvais, goes on to describe poverty as blessed: ‘paupertas est odibile bonum’ [hateful good] (l.276, 287); a source of strength, ‘cura animarum’ [guardian of souls] (l.286); ‘remocio curarum’ [removal of cares] (l.277). 54 S. BYRNE
David Aers argues that to read the poem blind to class and class conflicts is to misrepresent ‘the web of interlocutions’ to which it belongs.
We can only grasp the force and direction of Passus VI of Piers Plowman, only understand its minute particulars, when we see it as a politically com- mitted piece of writing in a class struggle which many, many English men and women experienced very differently to those who passed and tried to enforce the Statutes of Labour through coercive physical action, economic punishments, and rhetoric. Only if we grasp the ideological commitments at this point of the poem will we respond adequately to the famous turn in Passus VII where Piers abandons what has, in fact, been a disciplinary role in the service of particular vested interests. Indeed, the poem’s idealization of such disciplinary action had been part of the problem. The greatness of Piers Plowman involves a deep and shifting ideological engagement with the communities, conflicts and webs of interlocutions in medieval England. No reading of the poem that turns its back on the networks of power, together with the conflicts they involved, can hope to meet the exploratory force, and difficulties, of this poem.126
Passus VII contains the scene in which Piers is given a document offer- ing pardon and entry to heaven for some and partial indulgence for oth- ers. A priest offers to construe it, whether because he assumes that Piers cannot read and needs help, or because he feels that the laity should rely upon a clergyman to interpret God’s word. He declares that the document is not a pardon at all, as it consists of only two lines:
Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; Qui vero mala, in ignem eternum. (Passus VII, ll. 113–114)
[And those who have done good shall go into life eternal; those who have done bad into eternal fire.]
On hearing this, the Pellagian heresy, Piers, enraged, tears it in two. The meaning of this, and of Piers’s subsequent vow to work less hard and spend more time in penitence, has been contested.127 Helen Barr notes that nothing in this document adds up:
its source(s), its material form, its wording, or its purpose. There is no con- sistent reading, on either a literal or an allegorical level that can paper over its narrative cracks. As such, while it is a shock that Piers should tear it in two 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 55
(7.115), his response attends honestly to the complete muddle, socially and theologically, that this episode enacts.128
If we assume that the priest finds no value in the document because it isn’t written in the convoluted and exclusive language of canon law, rejecting its simple truth, then Piers’s destruction of the paper could represent not a rejection of that message but a rejection of the document. It could rep- resent suspicion of legalese, sold indulgences, and the kinds of written record that led to the imposition of heavy taxes and unjust laws. The sim- ple message is nonetheless not written in the vernacular but in Latin, the language of Church, law, and scholarship, and both Will and Piers quote Latin and refer to texts. Neither is one of the ‘lewed’ uneducated men of the Prologue who
ne koude Jangle ne jugge þat justifie hem sholde. (ll.129–130)
That the written ‘pardon’ is false may be suggested by the ‘true’ pardon given in Passus XIX, in which the paraclete/Grace descends on the righ- teous and the condition of ‘Piers’ pardon’ is given without documenta- tion: ‘pay what you owe’. Barr notes, importantly, that the first pardon is ‘purchased’, and that the Latin tag suggests that it is a Papal indul- gence. The coin with which it was secured is different in kind from the payment, ‘Dobest’, that will secure everlasting life. This follows other revisions earlier in the text. ‘Passus 17 reformulates the impossible prom- ise of reward in passus 7 in theologically consonant documentary terms’; the open writ from whose seal hangs the bleeding body of Christ cruci- fied makes explicit
the transition from the Old Law to the New, and the necessity of human beings to keep the commandment of love so that ‘nevere devel hym dere, ne deeth in soule greve’ (17.18). In contrast to the pardon in Passus 7, the material form of the document and its allegorical terms are congruent with God’s promise to human beings to redeem them from sin.129
The networks of power represented in Langland’s poem are of both church and state. The dreamer finds corruption at all levels, as both clergy and laity fail to perform the obligations of their position. The dreamer observes the same kinds of injustice which generated unrest and resistance 56 S. BYRNE in the mid-fourteenth century and were later used as justification for the risings of 1381. Monks and priests break their vows and instead of provid- ing pastoral care commit sins of lust, gluttony, and sloth.130 Though the poem asserts no heretical theological views, and has no issues with faith itself, it represents the clergy as deeply fallible. Even the Pope is accused of not caring that Christians are dying (XIX, ll.446–449). What was criti- cised was not Christianity or the institution of the Church but ‘the failure of […] many individual clerics to live up to the standards expected of them’.131 Among the laity, members of the knightly ruling class don’t provide protection and fair dealing for the third estate, but impose unfair taxes and binding Statutes on labourers,132 and enforce the continuance of serfdom; merchants cheat. Nonetheless, up to a point, the hierarchised, interdepen- dent order is not challenged but reinforced. Piers gives his conservative manifesto of the social contract between the classes (VI, ll.14–33), when he promises to toil and sweat all of his life to keep everyone fed, provided that the knight will protect the Church and people against villains who threaten them and will hunt the vermin that break the hedge boundaries and eat the crops. He reminds the knight that those who fail to keep their feudal obligation to be good lords to their tenants will be punished here- after (VI, ll.38–44), but the serf who breaks the laws that forbid him to own or sell things, or to wander away from his manor, may meet the bad lord in Purgatory.
For may no cherl chartre make, ne his c[h]atel selle Withouten leve of his lord—no lawe wol it graunte. Ac he may renne in arerage and rome fro home, And as a reneyed caytif recchelesly aboute. Ac Reson shal rekene with hym and rebuken hym at the laste, And Conscience accounte with hym and casten him in arerage, And putten him after in prison in purgatorie to brenne, For his arerages rewarden hym there right to the day of dome. (XI, ll.127–134)
People of any estate may be punished by both God’s and secular justice for failing to keep faith with their position, in the case of labourers, for idling, wasting, or feigning disability, because not labouring meant a failure to perform the ordained duty of providing food for others, so was both anti- social and an attempt to appropriate the otium of the knightly class (who 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 57 had ease in the sense of not performing manual labour but were not con- sidered idle). It was also the consequence of (original) sin and being sinful.133
‘Multa enim mala docuit otiositas [….] operantem monachum daemone uno pulsari, otiosum uero innumeris spiritibus deuastari’ [For indeed idleness teaches many evils […] the monk who works is tempted by a single demon, but the idle monk is the victim of innumerable spirits].134
The Church’s attitude to purposeful labour is said to be ambivalent:
On the one hand, the Church insisted that ‘eos qui operari nolunt ill otiosi- tatis uitio inquietos semper exsistere’ (those who refuse to work are always troubled with the vice of laziness). On the other hand, it made no sense to invest too much time and effort in building the material world, for one never knew when Jesus would come a second time to bring that world to an end. In the meantime, however, the community had to meet its legitimate material needs.135
In Passus VI, Piers demands a fair day’s work from those on his half-acre, and gets it from some. Those who pretend to be incapacitated or other- wise refuse to work are threatened by the knight with the weight of the law, but Piers sends Hunger to wring, buffet, and beat them, though he relents, and saves them from dying of starvation with his pea flour and pea soup (ll.115–186). This is in keeping with the law: Piers chooses those who have worked well to return next year. The Statutes of Labourers required indentured labour to remain for the full year; Piers doesn’t give charity to those capable of work who are not in orders. Nicola Masciandaro asserts that the poem is a ‘spiritual heroization of labor’.136 It is not a her- oisation of (all) people of the labouring class. No objection is raised to the king who turns up in Passus XIX, arguing that he has the right to take what he needs in order to rule and defend the people and the church, but Conscience does make a proviso:
‘In condicion,’ quod Conscience, ‘that thow konne defende, And rule thi reaume in reson, right wel and in truthe, That thow [have thyn askyng], as the law asketh: Omnia sunt tua ad defendendum set non ad deprehendendum.’ (ll.481–484) [All yours to defend but not to ruin.] 58 S. BYRNE
Piers also reminds the knight that his inferior on Earth may be placed above him in Heaven (VI, ll.46–47), echoing, for example, The Canterbury Tales’s distinction between the conferring of gentility by birth (rank) and its attainment by action (see later). Even before this conversation, that those who plough are the first to be specified among the people on the fair field (Prologue, l.20) rather than, as part of the third estate, coming last, could seem to challenge the conventional order, as could the ploughman’s prominence in crafts which profit the community (Prologue, ll.119–120). Later in the work, of course, Piers is raised to the highest of high in the comparison to Christ:
I fel eftsones aslepe—and sodeynly me mette That Piers the Plowman was peynted al blody, And com in with a cros before the commune peple, And right lik in alle lymes to Oure Lord Jesu. (XIX, ll.5–8)137 and becomes the ploughman of Grace (XIX, ll.262–263). Rather than chal- lenging feudal hierarchies, the poem seems to preach the observation of the letter and the spirit of the laws of God and man concerning the estate into which one is set, and keeping faith with truth. Neither Piers nor the knight imposes the sanction he threatens. This and the frequent references to Conscience may suggest a redirection of emphasis. In the Prologue’s fable of belling the cat, the wise mouse counsels the rats, who are too afraid to put a bell on the cat, that killing the cat would be pointless, as ‘yet sholde ther come another’ (l.185), and it is better to lose a few than possibly many. Moreover, the cat is necessary; without it they could not rule themselves:
For hadde ye rates youre wille, ye kouthe noght rule yowselve. (l.201)
Subsequently, people are enjoined to consult their own conscience rather than to obey Church and State in fear of reprisal in life or after. The out- come is much the same. That which is moral and good is that which ben- efits ‘the commune’, which is people fulfilling the obligations of their station. This is in keeping with statements in the Confessio:
Of al the comun poeple aboute, Withinne Burgh and ek withoute, […] O lawe mot governe hem alle. (VII, ll.1689–1696) 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 59
and
Ech hath his propre duete. (VII, ll.2711)
Grace echoes this by speaking of the treasures or gifts that he has bestowed on each person, the crafts to which they should cleave and which they should perform to the best of their ability (XIX, ll.216–245). The separate crafts should not be in conflict but should love and respect one another, a message that reinforces the Unity section of the narrative. This offers a remedy for what Arner sees as social friction rooted in the relations of production and leading to social friction and participation in insurrection.
Merchants strove to reduce artisans’ remuneration, in an attempt to maxi- mise their own profits, setting the terms of trade, but as dealers in raw mate- rials and as wide-scale marketers of finished goods, acting as intermediaries in markets to which artisans, including master craftsmen, lacked access. As Caroline M. Barron observes, after 1350 there were frequently conflicts among London guilds between men who were employers of labor and sell- ers of goods and the workers whom they employed, often the poorer members of the same craft [… and] the city ‘was exposed to almost continu- ous rioting during the 1370s and 1380s’.138
Strohm argues that Chaucer and men like him were exposed more inten- sively than most to ‘the claims and counter claims of hierarchical and anti- hierarchical ideas’ about social structure because their position was ambiguous, definable only by an appeal to competing systems.139 They were
gentle in rank, but insecurely so; linked to the nobility, but less by sworn and eternal ties than by temporary contracts; members of a feudal retinue that actually combined elements of a political party and a precocious bureaucracy.140
Chaucer’s poetry, in Strohm’s terms, provides an intersection for ‘ideo- logically charged ideas about social relations’, though, unlike that of Langland, not a provision for solutions. Strohm, however, emphasises here and elsewhere a Chaucer who envisages social harmony and unity as possible. Marion Turner, rejecting idealised portraits of amiable Geoffrey Chaucer and his optimistic view of social relations, however, finds Chaucer’s work a site of tension and conflict, depicting fictional and mythical acts of betrayal and treachery that are analogous to those 60 S. BYRNE observed by the author. She sees Troilus and Criseyde, a product of Chaucer’s time at the customs house, as having concerns ‘embedded in the politics of late fourteenth-century London. Prominent among these concerns is an anxiety about betrayal and urban division, a concern that could easily be explored through the story of Troy’.141 Turner is here less concerned with the London risings of 1381, which Chaucer may have witnessed from his Aldgate lodging, than with the aftermath. She reads Troilus and Criseyde alongside letters from 1380s London which accuse a group of aldermen of opening the gates of London to the rebels. The comparison of the accusations, part of continuing conflict between fac- tions of London merchant guilds142 and Troilus and Criseyde ‘serve[s] to illustrate the changing allegiances and betrayals that dominated London politics in the 1380s’.143 It shows that the discourse of betrayal permeates the texts, as well as the significance of the opposition of the multivalent terms ‘truth’ and ‘treason’. ‘Troilus and Criseyde reveals what the accusa- tions of the aldermen imply: that the discourse of treachery and the scapegoating of individual traitors is a smokescreen to cover up a more general and pervasive social antagonism.’144 The alleged traitors are said to be responsible for all the damage brought about by the rising, as though the rebels themselves were less to blame than the alderman who allegedly opened the gates to them. The culpable actions of those who know better have literally let in the mindless bestial mob. Similarly, in Troilus and Criseyde,
the people are depicted as blind and thoughtless, obeying a mindless mob mentality, which will lead them to destroy themselves. They disregard Hector—‘“holder up of Troye!”’ (II, l. 644)—and invite the return of Antenor, who will betray the city through his removal of the Palladium. The idea of the folly of the people is emphasized by this stress on Antenor’s behaviour, as the ‘cloude of errour’ (IV, l. 200) of the masses is described. The unreliability of popular opinion is also referred to at other points in the poem.145
Social tension, rivalry, and conflict in late Middle English literature, then, are represented as both between and within social classes. ‘Chaucer’s poem questions and problematizes the idea of containing blame for civic division within a few individuals—a pertinent issue indeed in the 1380s—and suggests that urban fragmentation is more wide- spread than this.’146 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 61
If fragmentation was widespread, then associations of individuals, com- panies, and fraternities would seem to be a remedy, but Turner shows that these social and craft guilds were viewed with suspicion in the 1380s.
The guilds epitomized the idea of problematic association and they became a focus of scrutiny in the wake of the Cambridge Parliament of 1388. During this parliament, held from 9 September to 17 October, the Commons pre- sented a list of petitions. The first called for the abolition of livery and badges, the second for the abolition of guilds and fraternities, except for chantries. The Westminster Chronicle reports this petition: Item qe touz lez gildes et fraternites et lour comune boistes soient oustez et adnullez pur touz jours et les biens et chateux en possessioun disposez pur la guerre par discrecion des seignurs du parlement, salvant toute foitz chaun- teries ordeinez dauncien temps pur lalmes de lour fondours et autres amor- tisez par licence du roy et autres choses ordenez al honour de seint esglise et encres de divine servise sanz livere, confederacie, meintenaunce ou riotes en arrerissement du ley. Also, that all guilds and fraternities and their common chests shall be abolished and done away with for all time and the goods and chattels in their possession laid out upon the war at the discretion of the lords of parliament, saving always chantries ordained in ancient time for the souls of their found- ers and others acquired in mortmain by royal licence and other things ordained to the honour of Holy Church and the increase of divine service, without livery, confederacy, maintenance, or riots in hindrance of the law.147
The fellowship of The Canterbury Tales might seem innocuous or even positive, particularly as they come together for mutual safety and company on a journey with a spiritual purpose, a pilgrimage. The very opening of the ‘General Prologue’, however, disperses the idea that the journey is undertaken for religious reasons, any more than everyone who joined a social or craft guild did so from piety. The pilgrimages are undertaken because the fine weather of Spring makes people long to get about after the darkness and privations of Winter, and the trope of the arrival of long days during which birds sing all the time is associated with secular love lyrics. The pilgrims are not all good, honest, or even pleasant people, and they don’t all get on; they are rude, competitive, and aggressive. Turner relates the company of pilgrims to that of the guilds.
Like the self-regulating guilds, Chaucer’s group is a self-governing entity ‘reuled’ (‘General Prologue’, l. 816) by the ‘juggement’ (l. 818) of their ‘governour’ (l. 813). The compaignye constitutes itself as a ritualistic associa- 62 S. BYRNE
tion, employing the same rites and traditions as contemporary guilds. The members bond together by the swearing of binding ‘othes’ (l. 810) and the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ ends with the ritual kiss—‘Anon they kiste and ryden forth hir weye’ (‘Pardoner’s Tale’, l. 968). […] [T]he importance of the idea of brotherhood is demonstrated in symbolic rites: the guild of St Katherine, Aldersgate, London, demands that new initiates swear the oath of the guild and then kiss. It explains: The furst poynt is this, þat whan a brother or a suster schal be resceyued, þat þey schul be swore upon a book to þe brotherhede, for to holde vp and meyntene þe poyntʒ and the articles þat be write after folwynge, eche man to his power, sauynge his estat; and þat eueriche brother and suster, in toke- nynge of loue, charite, and pes, atte resceyuynge schule kusse eueri other of þo þat be þere.148
Similarly, the Guild of Garlekhith in London is said to be founded, in 1375, for ‘amendement of her lyues and her soules, and to noriche more loue bytwene þe bretheryn and sustren of þe bretherhede: and eche of hem had sworen on þe boke, to perfourme þe pointʒ vndernethe wryten atte here power’.149 Such groups, which set their own rules of admittance and self-governance150 were essential in a time when might was often all that was right and the individual non-gentil had little power, but they could also be the focus for suspicion; they might harbour secrets, fester discontent, and nourish plots. They might manipulate the mindless multi- tudes and let them in through the gates to wreak destruction on civilised life. As the Host of the Tales’ pilgrims, Harry Bailey is a kind of honorary Guild Master. He obtains agreement that any member of the company who breaks the rules will pay for the drinks, but the pilgrims break his rules and disrupt the unity he attempts to maintain.151 The characters of the Tales represent the middle ranges of contempo- rary English society. They range no higher than the knight and, other than the somewhat ambiguous Plowman, no lower than the artisan and free workman. All are able to afford to go on pilgrimage, though some will have expenses covered by the Church and others by a guild; all can ride. In their dialogue and their tales, they articulate contemporary ideas and debates about the structure of society, morality, and happiness, and con- clude that both goodness and happiness result from good deeds. This would seem to be egalitarian, but good is conceived as liberal, generous, and compassionate or sympathetic, the qualities of gentilesse, originally cognate with nobility in the sense of blood and rank. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 63
The Tales include an unequivocal statement of the divine ordinance of the social hierarchy given by the Parson, who states that because of sin all the world was in thraldom and subjection, but since the time of grace that has changed:
God ordeyned that som folk sholde be moore heigh in estaat and in degree, and som folk moore lough, and that everich sholde be served in his estaat and in his degree. (X, ll.771)
Within the Parson’s model of the feudal system, high degree entails responsibilities. ‘Sovereyntee’ has been designed to ensure that ‘underlyn- ges’ are kept and defended; therefore, the Parson says:
thilke lords that been lyk wolves, that devouren the possessiouns or the catel of povre folk wrongfully, withouten mercy or mesure,/ they shul receyven by the same mesure that they han measured to povre folk the mercy of Jhesu Crist, but if it be amended. (X, ll.775–776)
‘The Tale of Melibee’, narrated by Chaucer’s textual persona, counsels that should a person of high degree behave badly, but not precisely as a devouring wolf, to one of a lower order, the person of lower status should not retaliate:
And Catoun seith, ‘If a man of hyer estaat or degree, or moore mighty than thou, do thee anoy or grevaunce, suffer hym,/ for he that oones hath greved thee, may another tyme releeve thee and helpe.’ (VII, 1489–1490)
Cato is deployed as an authority for the argument that the man of higher degree might recall his feudal duties or that he should be expected to help or hinder as best suits him on the occasion. Prudence, however, supplants this with spiritual, and therefore more convincing, arguments for avoiding social strife. The ordained and interdependent social model coexists in the Canterbury Tales with other more open models whose divisions are by no means insurmountable. Brewer describes degrees as like the rungs on a ladder—they are fixed but the people on them are not152—and argues that money, though not enough in itself to confer high degree, is required by those of high degree to maintain their estate.153 The Knight, the highest- ranking of the Pilgrims, can interrupt others and be praised by the Host, whereas the Miller is chided for interrupting the Monk; yet the Knight 64 S. BYRNE also generously applauds upward social mobility and deplores hearing sad tales of the loss of estate. He hails the Monk:
‘Hoo!’ quod the Knyght, ‘good sir, namoore of this! That ye han seyd is right ynough, ywis, And muchel moore; for litel hevynesse Is right ynough to muche folk, I gesse. I seye for me, it is a greet disese, Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas! As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunat, And there abideth in prosperitee. Swich thyng is gladsom, as it thynketh me, And of swich thyng were goodly for to telle.’ (VII, 2767–2779)
Nonetheless, Brewer argues that elsewhere, for example, in the ‘General Prologue’, Chaucer expresses (or, rather, perhaps ventriloquises,) con- tempt for social climbers,154 such as the Haberdasshere, Carpenter, Webbe, Dyere, and Tapycer, who feel that their Guildsman status makes them ‘of a solempne and a greet fraternite’ and whose livery155 is accessorised expensively (I, ll.361–368) including knives, girdles, and pouches mounted with silver (ll.366–367). That the Guildsmen wear knives in conjunction with pouches hung from belts may itself be an indication of their social pretensions; they are carrying arms as well as being fashionable.156 Their wives are similarly status-conscious, and
wolde it wel assente; And elles certeyn were they to blame. It is ful fair to been ycleped ‘madame,’ And goon to vigilies al before, And have a mantel roialliche ybore. (I, ll.374–378)
This is fairly gentle satire if it is satire. More scathing remarks are saved for transgression within Brewer’s second version of the social model, the binary distinction between gentil and churl. In one view, the gentil were royalty, lords, knights, and later esquires, perhaps extended to the upper echelons of bureaucrats at the court of the king or a noble. Though aris- tocratic disdain or affectation thereof might lump all the rest together, whether free or not, social practice distinguished between degrees in this 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 65 majority of the population, for example acknowledging the power and wealth of the nonruling urban merchant class. Nonetheless, the quality of gentilesse, a concept difficult to define157 but a matter of behaviour as well as rank, in opposition to churlishness, is stressed as vital to any concept of nobility in Chaucer’s works. Brewer finds gentilesse dissociated from degree in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’:
If a man does not do ‘gentil’ deeds, He nys nat gentil, be he duc or erl. (III 1157)
Gentilesse has become a moral ideal, a virtuous nobility of character inde- pendent of external social rank. It is personally chosen, and evinced in personal behaviour.
Thanne am I gentil, whan that I bigynne To lyven vertuously and weyve synne. (III 1175)158
Nonetheless, the Tales don’t preach any kind of political radicalism. Most of the characters who demonstrate their gentilesse (as opposed to charac- ters of whom the term gentil is used satirically) are of high degree, or in choosing to behave in a gentil fashion align themselves with those of high degree. Churl becomes the opposite of gentil in describing churlish behav- iour as villeigny opposes gentilesse, but these have overtones of belonging to the bonded class. Brewer notes an interesting paradox:
Though gentilesse implies due obedience to properly constituted authority, it is also, within its charmed circle, a great leveller. The king himself can be no more than a gentleman, like an untitled subject, and the queen herself no more than a lady; while, on the other hand, a great lord may become a churl if he submits to the thralldom of sin. This binary division more subtly articu- lates society, motivates and controls its members, judges both individual and general behaviour, is more free and fluid, than may at first appear.159
Where Brewer finds gentil behaviour almost egalitarian, R.D. Eaton finds a class- and gender-based distinction: ‘class determines the paths of moral decision-making’.160 In examining the concept of conscience in relation to a number of Chaucerian characters, particularly Cecile in ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’, Eaton finds that conscience ‘has its natural home in that human space where absolute purity of virtue intersects with the highest 66 S. BYRNE social refinement’. The ‘heroic model’ of Cecile’s virtue and purity, and ‘the silence which surrounds it—silence about common women and aris- tocratic men’ express Chaucer’s belief in ‘the inevitable moral inferiority of any other class or gender’. Eaton argues that in Chaucer’s work, the upper class ‘exerts something like proprietary rights over the conscience; whether obeying or finessing it, they define the gestures of moral reflex and choice. Everyone else is inclined to regard deep sensitivity to conscience as an aristocratic privilege, luxury or indulgence’. This suggests a concept close to that of sensibility in the eighteenth century.161 Eaton finds the influence of or reaction to ‘perceived aristocratic style’ in January, the Wife of Bath, and the Parson. January is ‘the Merchant’s cynical representation of the knight’s self-indulgence’; the Shipman shows ‘careless disregard for the dictates of a “nyce conscience”’; the Wife of Bath proposes a ‘“sweete spiced conscience” as an alternative model of behavior for her furious hus- band—a model of passivity and restraint foreign to both of them, for rea- sons of class’; the Parson ‘“ne maked him a spiced conscience”, expressing in that way his frustration with a generalized sense of aristocratic squea- mishness’. He is said to be either oblivious or indifferent to the ‘subtle moral evasions of the Troiluses of his world. When he sees sin, wrong and misery in the wretched world, there is no retrahens a malo for him; he wades in and does good’. The minor transgressions of characters ‘testify to the controlling power of a class-based model as powerfully as Cecile, Dido and Troilus do in honoring it’. For Darragh Greene, gentilesse is an ethical concept, and though this is bound up in sociopolitical status, the twelfth-century concept of cour- toisie is reconceptualised by the end of the fourteenth century as ‘an inter- locked complex of virtues directed at an egalitarian moral excellence’: gentilesse.162 In The Canterbury Tales, a ‘miscellany of competing texts in polyphonic dialectic on a series of, among other things, vexed philosophical problems’,163 Chaucer is ‘at pains to argue and exemplify’ that gentilesse ‘is only acquired through virtuous action, that is, in accordance with the principle of generositas virtus, non sanguis’.164 Thus, in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, ‘the low-born, peasant Griselda may through her consideration for others, personal disinterest, and generosity lay stronger claim to gentil status than Walter the marquis who, when introduced, is choicely described as the “gentilleste yborn of Lumbardye”’ (IV, l.72). The extent to which charac- ters such as the Franklin are represented as emulating the gentil-born and therefore performing gentilesse, and the extent to which they follow vir- tue ethics from goodness and without ambition, is debateable, but Greene 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 67 finds in the Franklin an assertion of the greater value of virtue ethics, the value system of gentilesse, over law-based morality. The liberality of the Franklin ‘makes the central case for virtue ethics in negotiating the per- plexing pathways of an alarmingly unpredictable world’.165 His tale shows the fallibility of rigid laws, deontological obligations, and abstract morals, emphasising instead the importance of compassion. Aurelius finally saves Dorigen from her moral dilemma concerning trauthe and wifely duty to Averagus by rescinding her debt to him, and thus demonstrating gentilesse.
And in his herte he caughte of this greet routhe, Considerynge the beste on every syde, That fro his lust yet were hym levere abyde Than doon so heigh a cherlyssh wrecchednesse Agayns franchise and alle gentillesse. (V, ll.1520–1524)
The importance of the development of gentilesse in the fourteenth cen- tury as a refinement of the concept of courtoisie from the late twelfth century will be evident in the following discussion of Gawain and the Green Knight. Many of the satirical and complaint poems discussed here describe cor- rupt behaviour in members of all estates, but none advocates an end to the by then old-fashioned model of social structure. The texts reiterate a major Middle English theme, and use that theme to argue that the ordained social order and its associated networks of power, if applied humanely and without corruption, should be maintained. Trauthe [trauþe; trawþe; treuþe; trowthe] in Middle English texts, often paired with sothfastness or soothefastness,166 connoting truthfulness and steadfastness, means more than truth or one’s word; it means integrity, fidelity to the duties and ide- als of one’s place in life and therefore loyalty to those who command and order that place, whether God, the feudal lord, the craft master, or the person who has contracted services for a year. Thomas Wimbledon’s ser- mon of 1388 refers to Christ as the ‘auctour and doctour of trewth’, and preaches the importance of and holy sanction for the three estates: ‘Riʒt so in þe chirche beeþ nedeful þes þre offices: presthod, kynʒthod, [and] laboreris’.167 Chaucer’s ‘Truth’ or ‘Balade de Bon Conseyl’ reiterates at the end of each of the four stanzas ‘And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede’ (l.7, etc.).168 His ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’ laments all that is lost through lack of steadfastness and the turn ‘fro trouthe to fikelnesse’ (l.20), including that ‘[t]routhe is put doun, resoun is hodlen fable’ (l.15).169 In 68 S. BYRNE that poem’s ‘Lenvoy to King Richard’ he lists what the king must do to ‘wed’ his people again to steadfastness, which, apart from desire to be honourable, cherish his people, and hate extortion, are
Suffre nothing that may be reprevable To thyn estat don in thy region. Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun, Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse. (ll.24–27)
In his ‘Franklin’s Tale’, Dorigen’s returning husband Averagus counsels her to keep her rash promise of love to Aurelius, suggesting that the ‘wor- thy knight’ holds adultery less culpable than breaking an oath:
‘It may be wel, paraventure, yet to day. Ye schul youre trouthe holden, by my fay! For God so wisly have mercy upon me, I hadde wel levere ystiked for to be For verray love which that I to yow have, But of ye sholde youre trouthe kepe and save. Trouthe is the hyeste thing that man may kepe’. (V, ll.1473–1479) and in Confessio Amantis,
Among the vertus on is chief, And that is trouthe. (VII, ll.1723–1724)
In Piers Plowman, ‘Whan alle tresors arn tried, Truthe is the beste’ (I, l.135). God appears as Truth, just one of many meanings of the word, and the text reiterates, as has been seen, that those who are faithful to their estate live a good life. Trauthe as civic responsibility is opposed to will or self-interest. The poem’s strong religious as well as social message makes this a double obligation, so that untrauthe, or failure to keep faith with one’s estate, construed as disloyalty to king, lord, bishop, archbishop, Pope, or God, could be seen as a sinful as well as a socially disruptive act. In Cleanness, disobedient Adam is one who has failed in truth: Þurʒ þe faut of a freke þat fayled in trawþe. (l.236)170 For the labouring classes to become fully literate could be seen as enabling them not only to read the Bible and to develop lay scholasticism but also to practise disputatio, to debate and perhaps challenge canon and civic law. This breaking out of their ordained station and threatening the whole 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 69 social order would make them worse than the merchant classes who prefer mede (money, bribery, profit) to honest dealing, the priests who cheat their parishioners, the lazy mendicants who live off the poor, or the ruling classes who impose extortionate taxes, all of which are similarly failures of the mutual obligations of an idealised feudalism but which don’t threaten the stability of the structure. Wyclif is cited in contemporary chronicles such as that of Adam Usk as the cause of social discord.
Cuius magistri Iohannis, ut Machomdus, discipuli, potentibus et diuitibus placabilia, decimarum scilicet et oblacionum retencionem ac temporalium a clero ablacionum, iuuenibusque incontinenciam meritorias existere predi- cando, multas clades, insidias, rixas et contenciones et sediciones adhuc durantes et, ut timeo, usque ad regni confusionem duraturas, nefandissime seminarunt.171 [Like Mohammed, the followers of this Master John, by preaching in favour of things that were pleasing to the rich and powerful, such as the withholding of tithes and oblations, the confiscation of temporalities from the clergy, and the immorality of the young, most wickedly incited numerous massacres, plots, disputes, quarrels, and rebellions, which continue to this day and will result, I fear, in the ruin of the kingdom.]
Wycliffite sermons do not advocate overthrow of the traditional social order, they support the three-estate structure. Nonetheless, as Barr shows, Lollardy can be seen to harbour ‘dissident energy’ and to have ‘radical potential’.172 This is perhaps most evident in their claim, mentioned ear- lier, to be ‘tresoris of Cryst and his apostlis’.173 Kate Crassons delineates what she sees as a powerful social imaginary in late medieval England that distinguished the poor labourer from the poor beggar and made the lowest underclass, the unwaged poor, criminals.
With the enactment of labour laws that criminalised able-bodied begging and indiscriminate charity, one can see the development of a powerful social imaginary in fourteenth-century England. Constituting what critics have termed a ‘shift in values’ or a ‘newer ethos’, labour became a sign of virtue whilst poverty emerged as a symptom of idleness and other sins.174
Crassons finds contemporary writing a crucial resource for understanding the anxieties that poverty provoked. She contends that poverty is ‘inti- mately bound up with concerns about representation’, a site of cul- tural crisis. 70 S. BYRNE
Literary texts are essential to the study of poverty because poverty is as much an economic force as it is an epistemological issue that challenges our ability to know and fix the precise nature of material reality. We only discern what we conceptualise as the economic through symbolic representation.175
Freedman, Barr, and others describe a double vision of the poor landless agricultural labourer, the peasant, who is simultaneously represented as ridiculous and contemptible (see, e.g., the quotations from Gower and from contemporary chronicles cited earlier) and spiritually blessed and closer to God.176 The spiritual benefit of poverty is derived from the neces- sity of the peasants’ labours, the merit that their suffering confers on them, and the virtue of labour as emblematic of divine labour and sacrifice.177 For Crassons, in the fourteenth century poverty ceases to be holy and becomes culpable, and indiscriminate charity, rather than being a univer- sally meritorious act, becomes foolish or positively criminal as poverty becomes beggary, which becomes professional begging, the actions of idlers and wasters. In 1376, the Commons petition
qe come en touz counteez parmy la terre et [sic: read ‘est’] grant suffreite de servantz, par cause qe plusours fortz ribauds mendivent et ne vuillent labourer, mes par faiterie tapissent en citees et borghs pur eaise de lours corps, quele ils trovent plus legerement illeoqes qe aillours. Pur qi ils supplient qe touz les meires et baillifs des citees et borghs soient chargez de diligentement enquere sur ceste matiere, et ceux qe serront tro- vez faux faitours soient exillez de lours villes, et s’ils soient autrefoith trovez de deinz ycell, q’ils soient reddement punytz par prisoun, ou autre voie. [that whereas in all counties throughout the land there is a great lack of servants, because many able-bodied scoundrels beg and will not labour, but on account of their laziness hide in cities and boroughs for the ease of their bodies, which they find more easily there than elsewhere. Wherefore they petition that all the mayors and bailiffs of cities and bor- oughs should be charged to inquire diligently into this matter, and that those who are found to be criminals should be exiled from their towns; and if they are again found in the same, they should be readily punished by imprisonment, or in another way.]178
The answer recorded is the following:
Endroit des fortz rybaudes < qi vont wakerantz > par le paiis, soit l’estatut de Wyncestre, et la declaracion d’ycelle, et les autres estatutz de roberdes- men etc. sur ce faitz tenuz et gardez, et myses en due execucion. Et quant 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 71
as autres qi se font par lour dit gentils, < et > hommes d’armes ou archers et sont devenuz a meschief par les guerres et autrement, s’ils ne purront prover lour dit, einz soit provez q’ils furent gentz de mestier, et ne soient en nully service, soient artez de servir, ou de repairer a lours mestiers quielles ils userent devant. [As regards able-bodied scoundrels who go vagrant in the regions, the statute of Winchester and the elucidation of the same and the other statutes of robbers etc. made thereon should be upheld, observed and duly exe- cuted. And as regards others who pretend by their word to be gentles, men- at-arms or archers who have come to misfortune by the wars and otherwise, if they cannot prove their word, but it is proved that they were people of craft and are not in any service, they should be forced to serve or to return to their crafts which they previously practised.]
This may indicate a disjunction between the image of the peasant in the late medieval imaginary or habitus and the official record for expedient governance; the imaginary can tolerate the double vision and incorpo- rate discourses which revile as well as others which venerate the poor landless labourer whereas the statute cannot. Crassons argues that liter- ary texts, including Piers Plowman, pay ‘explicit attention to poverty as an issue of cultural contestation’, articulating ‘a range of complex argu- ments about poverty that give us a lens into a moment of cultural change’.179 More explicit is the Lollard-influenced poemPierce the Plowman’s Crede. Wyclif’s sermons and other writing, seen in De Civili Dominio II ll.7–10 and The Twenty-Five Articles, assert that the poverty of Christ and his apos- tles should be the model of the church, ‘the evangelical poor should renounce all civil possessions; the endowment of the church was intended, not for the enrichment of the clergy, but for the care of the poor’.180 Although the tripartite order of society is not challenged, as Barr notes, the third estate is given special status, they ‘bere vp and susteyne þe oþere tweie parties of þe chirche, þat is: knyʒtes and clerkis’.181 Peres of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede is an exemplum of virtuous poverty and industry in contrast to the lazy, worldly friars of the poem. Inverting the earlier association of ploughmen with Cain and shepherds with Abel,182 the poem describes the friars as Cain’s kindred, sent by the devil to destroy the church (ll.486–487), whereas a ploughman becomes a shep- herd in offering a true creed. Peres is lower on the social scale than Piers Plowman, owning no land and having no employees. His clothes are barely held-together rags, and mud-splattered as he labours almost 72 S. BYRNE ankle-deep in the fen in his lumpy shoes stuffed with rags, his hands in worn-out mittens.
His cote was a cloute that cary was y-called, His hod was full of holes and his heer oute, With his knopped schon clouted full thykke; His ton toteden out as he the lond treddede His hosen ouerhingen his hokschynes on eueriche a side, Al beslombered in fen as he the plow folwede Twey myteynes, as mete, maad all of cloutes The fyngers weren for-werd and ful of fen honged This whit waslede in the fen almost to the ancle. (ll.422–430)
His heifers are feeble and so thin that you can see their ribs (ll.431–432); his wife wears a torn coat cut short and walks on ice with bare bleeding feet, wrapped in a winding-sheet (ll.433–436). Yet the first thing that he says to the narrator is to ask why he sighs and to offer sustenance (‘lijflode’, ll.444– 445). His creed is to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity, not to bother one’s wits with complicated doctrines, interpretations, and disputes:
And though this flaterynge freres wyln for her pride, Disputen of the deyte as dotards schulden, The more the matere is moved the [masedere hy] worthen. Lat the losels alone and leue you the trewthe, For Crist seyde it is so, so mot it need worthe; Therefore studye thou nought thereon, ne stere thi wittes, It is his blessed body, so bad he vs beleuen. Thise maystres of dyvinitie many, als y trowe, Folwen nought fully the feith as fele of the lewde. (ll. 819–827)
[And though flattering friars will dispute about the divine as fools would, the more the matter is picked over, the more baffled they become. Leave the rascals alone and believe the truth. For Christ said it was so, so must it be. Therefore don’t obsess over it, nor bestir your wits, it is his blessed body, that’s what he told us to believe. Those masters of divinity, as I believe, don’t follow the faith as well as many of the uneducated.]
By promoting the voice of the simple poor as a much-needed correction to the corruption of the times, Pierce the Plowman’s Crede and other Wycliffite texts ‘nourish the potential of vernacular literacy as an agent of sedition’.183 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 73
Gentils and Nobles The satire and castigation of late fourteenth-century complaint poems is not reserved for the middle and lowest rungs of the social ladder. Gower’s Mirour, without naming names, compares Edward III’s alleged dominion by his mistress Alice Perrers to the vanquishing of King David by Bathsheba, and argues that the king has abandoned honour for ‘foldelit [wantonness]’ (ll.22801–22824), and the Vox warns Edward against ‘ceca voluptas/ Carnis [blind lust of the flesh]’ (VI, II ll.853–854). Richard II is criticised more openly and in more detail in revisions to the Confessio, and in the later Cronica Tripertita. Russell A. Peck notes that the Cronica depicts Richard as a luxury-loving, greedy tyrant like Herod or the Prince of Hell and makes an overt comparison between such villains of the mys- tery plays and his central role in the staging of theatrical pageants designed to humiliate those who had withheld the money he demanded, and to represent him as a god.184 The anonymous Richard the Redeless (c.1400) depicts the Ricardian court as seen from below. In one way, the poem turns the tables of medi- eval satirical depiction, in that the nobles rather than the commoners are represented as beasts: the adherents of the crown as white harts, Gloucester as a swan, Arundel a horse, and Warwick a bear. In another, this is merely a reference to the nobles’ heraldic animals. The young courtiers who sur- rounded Richard during his minority are anything but beastlike in appear- ance. They are depicted as strutting about in extravagant clothes and inventing rapidly changing fashions. They will pay anything for the approved mode, and have anything not approved instantly remade.
Now, be the lawe of Lydfford, in londe [and] in water Thilke lewde ladde oughte euyll to thryue, That hongith on his hippis more than he wynneth, And doughteth no dette so dukis hem preise, But beggith and borwith of burgeis in tounes Furris of foyne and other felle-whare, And not the better of a bene though they boru euere. And, but if the slevis slide on the erthe, Thei woll be wroth as the wynde and warie hem that it made; And [but] yif it were elbowis adoun to the helis Or passinge the knee it was not acounted. And if Pernell preisid the pleytis bihynde, The costis were acountid paye whan he myght. 74 S. BYRNE
The leesinge so likyde ladies and other That they joied of the jette and gyside hem ther-vnder; And if Felice fonde ony [faute] thenne of the makynge, Yt was y-sent sone to shape of the newe. But now ther is a gyse the queyntest of all. A wondir coriouse crafte y-come now late, That men clepith kerving the clothe all to pecis, That seuene goode sowers sixe wekes after Moun not sett the seemes ne sewe hem ayeyn. But ther is a pr[o]ffit in that pride that I preise euere, For thei for the pesinge paieth pens ten duble That the clothe costened the craft is so dere. Now if I sothe shall saie, and shonne side tales, Ther is as moche good witte in swyche gomes nollis, As thou shuldist mete of a myst fro morwe tyll euen. Yit blame I no burne to be, as him oughte In comlich clothinge as his statt axith; But to ledyn her lust all here lyff-daies In quentise of clothinge for to queme Sir Pride, And euere-more stroutynge and no store kepe, And iche day a newe deuyse; it dullith my wittis That ony lord of a lond shulde leue swiche thingis, Or clepe to his conceill swiche manere cotis, That loueth more her lustis than the lore of oure Lord. (III, ll.145–181)185
Because of their love of long silken sleeves multiply slashed to show the fabric below, they are referred to synecdochally as ‘sleeves’. When Wit (wisdom) is seen in the court, in an old-fashioned, ‘holsum’ not overlong gown and hood (l.212), he is driven out, and the sleeves that trail on the ground cry ‘Lete sle him!’ (l.234). Another poem in the Piers Plowman tradition,186 Mum and the Sothsegger is both an estates satire and a picaresque journey in quest of the answer to the question of whether discrete reticence or truth-telling is best, an answer predetermined by the negative representation of Mum. Though, like Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger finds much amiss in the times, it is no more radical or revolutionary than Piers Plowman. Both support a monarchy, albeit a limited one, and criticise civil disobedience as much as social injustice and excessive taxation. They scru- tinise but do not reject the machineries of power.187 Though reason and conscience are alluded to as the principles of conduct, and ‘natural order’ as the principle of social organisation, nature in fact is the legal authority. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 75
Speaking out against wrong is endorsed, but only through the proper channels. The author doesn’t ‘carpe’ at knights of the shires counselling the king (ll.1460–1461). To seek redress for injustice in parliament is right; for the labourers to complain is wrong because it interferes with the function of the other estate, the separate sphere of the nobles’ duty to safeguard the realm.
But hit longeth to no laborier the lawe is agayne thaym. And yit hit is y-vsid with vnwise peuple And a-vailleth not a ferthing, but vireth the hertz; That tournen with thaire tales the tente of the lordes, That thay leven the labour the londe to defende, To bisye thaym on the bordures to bete oute oure foes, And maynteyne the marches fro myschief and elles. (ll.1462–1468)
These tales are distinguished from criticism levelled in satire by writers, who are not unwise labourers. Barr notes that ll.72–95 are a legal defence of satirical poetry, and the beekeeper, an avatar of the Sothsegger, com- missions a truth-telling book from the narrator.188 The narrator ostensibly doesn’t write such a book, even though it is of course in the reader’s hands, but instead unties a whole bag of books that had been suppressed by Mum, who ‘bare a-weye the bagges and many a boxe eeke’ (l.1342); books that record the failings and faults of the times. Less seditious than Pierce the Plowman’s Crede, but as ambiguous and seemingly contradictory as the holly branch and axe brandished by the Green Knight, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight189 interrogates and tests the precepts of ruling-class life. Whereas estates satires find fault in all ranks, but stress nonetheless the importance of maintaining (or re- establishing) the conventional structure of the realm, Gawain focuses on the court and the knightly classes. Whilst seeming to show a court and its exemplar as the ideal synthesis of outward and inward chivalric qualities, the story could be read as depicting an upper class that pays lip service to chivalry and performs courtesy, but whose ideals fail when tested. By refusing an unambiguous and determinate ending complete with the hero’s triumph, the defeat of the villain and a moral lesson, Gawain both humanises Gawain as a more three-dimensional flawed and conscience- stricken hero than might have been expected, and invites doubt. If these men are to be served and admired not only because of their birth rank but also because of their conduct, what happens when they don’t fulfil the ide- als they live by? 76 S. BYRNE
Some other questions raised by the narrative include the following: why the Green Knight does not kill Gawain if the beheading game is part of a malign plot of Morgan la Faye; whether Morgan would have allowed the Green Knight to demonstrate a code of honour in sparing Gawain because he was not seduced; whether the plot was supposed to trap Arthur; whether or not the ‘magic’ girdle really protects; whether or not it in fact did protect Gawain, in that the Green Knight does not kill him; from whom Gawain assumes Bertilak thinks the exchanged kisses came; why Gawain feels guilty for shrinking from the axe, when he has been dou- bly shriven. Maurice Keen notes the polyvalence of the term ‘chivalry’, ‘a word used in the Middle Ages with different meanings and shades of meaning by dif- ferent writers and in different contexts’.190 It may be an order, comparable to an order of religion, an estate or social class, or a code of values, but it ‘cannot be divorced from the martial world of the mounted warrior: it can- not be divorced from aristocracy, because knights commonly were men of high lineage: and from the middle of the twelfth century on it very fre- quently carries ethical or religious overtones’.191 In this story, from much later than the twelfth century, Sir Gawain represents the highest ideals of chivalry in synthesis. He refuses to allow his king to be shamed by having no knight of his court respond to a challenge, but does not allow King Arthur to risk himself. He stoically bears cold, hunger, and privation. He behaves with courtesy at the court of Bertilak. Above all, he honours his oath, his trauthe,192 living through a year of anticipatory dread followed by a long hard journey whilst foreseeing death as probable at its end: ‘Gawain must go out and seek his own destruction simply because he has given his word to do so.’193 At the same time, he betrays the chivalric code. He fails to give Bertilak everything that he has gained in the exchange game; he goes to the second round of the beheading game believing that he has a magic girdle to protect him from harm; he flinches at the first two blows. Gawain is punished for his failure of chivalry in a parody of the cere- mony of dubbing a knight, made monstrous by the use of an axe instead of a sword and by the inflicting of a blow with the edge (the word used, ‘barbe’, suggests a point) rather than a ritual buffet with the flat of the weapon.
He lyftes lyʒtly his lome and let hit doun fayre With þe barbe of þe bitte bi þe bare nek Þaʒ he homered heterly, hurt hym no more Bot snyrt hym on þat on syde, þat seuered þe hyde. (ll.2309–2312) 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 77
Taking the roles of the lord conferring the accolade of knighthood and a confessor who gives absolution, Bertilak positions himself as Gawain’s superior, and humiliates Gawain by revealing his knowledge of Gawain’s moment of fear. The narrative doesn’t allow such an unqualified reading, however. The fear is understandable, as Bertilak says; even noble knights are allowed to love life and protect their bodies. This seeming conclusion or moral is also qualified: Gawain chooses to wear the green girdle as a visible public mark of his shame, his untrauthe, the bodily mark of the wound having healed. Again, there is qualification: the courtiers make the girdle a mark of honour. Like Chaucer’s Dorigen, Gawain is assailed by a character who desires or seems to desire him. In Chaucer’s tale it is that character, Aurelius, to whom Dorigen makes a promise; in Gawain, it is that character, Bertilak’s wife (he promises not to tell anyone about her gift of the girdle), but also the Green Knight (he promises to take his blow) and Bertilak (he prom- ises to exchange gifts), so Gawain’s trauthe is tested several times. He keeps his promise to the lady, and to the englamoured Bertilak, but only partially to the unensorcelled man, in giving the kisses (or at least like-for- like) but withholding the girdle. The oath-keeping that seems most brave and commendable, turning up to be beheaded, however, turns out to be less important as a test than the oath-keeping associated with the exchange game, since the Green Knight doesn’t try to kill Gawain, and punishes him not for flinching at the first two blows but for not handing over the girdle. That Gawain passes the seeming test of the beheading game is margin- alised. That he wears the allegedly protective girdle to the beheading is not given much importance. That he failed the non-physical test, the test not of courage proven on his body but of his promise to share is made vitally important. The expensive armour, the ‘panoply of war’ with which Gawain is equipped before he goes on his quest, representing the martial aspect of chivalry, is useless in the beheading game, as Barron notes194 (though it will have been useful against the dragons and giants on the journey to the castle). A soft fabric girdle is the important thing. This inversion of signifi- cance, so that the non-corporeal, intangible failing and the flimsy artefact are paramount, accords with the location of the event. Once Gawain is inside, the Castle of Hautdesert is given solid, specific description. As Gawain approaches the castle, however, he notices that
‘pared out of papure purely hit semed.’ (l.802) 78 S. BYRNE
He has a fleeting image of a paper castle with neatly snipped tessellations, an illusion, which snaps into solidity as the magical glamour enfolds him. In this magical paper castle that has sprung into being in a mysterious and perilous landscape in answer to his prayer, behaviour is as flimsy as paper, based on transient fashion, gossip, and hearsay.195 Andrew Waldron defines chivalry as a composite code of behaviour forged from disparate elements, including Germanic qualities of ‘martial prowess, loyalty to one’s lord, and generosity to one’s followers’, as well as Christian moral absolutes and social accomplishments: ‘music, poetry, and elegant conversation’—the accomplishments of Continental ideals of courtesy.196 That composite is described by Mann, building on Henri Dupin’s ten-point classification of gentilesse.197 For Mann, at the end of the twelfth century, ‘the courtly and profane’ inspiration of chivalry ‘tended to be transformed into religious and mystical’.198 Secular courtly love was replaced by the love of God and virtue, and the highest aspiration was the fulfilment of the quest for the Grail. Following Dupin’s differen- tiation of internal and external qualities of gentilesse, external being the performance of formal good manners in hospitality and the rituals of greeting and leave-taking, Mann shows that Chaucer’s ‘The Parson’s Tale’ and poem ‘Gentilesse’ focus on the internal or moral attributes rather than the external. Gawain demonstrates both internal and external qualities that make up the later synthesis of chivalry. He is a brave fighting man. We are told of his devotion to the Virgin Mary and loyalty to his king. He politely removes his helm or bows, and at the point when etiquette requires it, he gives his host his name.199 Whilst to an extent praising these, the poem also scrutinises them, and considers whether they are truly compatible, not, as in Chaucer’s writing, by humour, irony, and satire, but through character. The refinements of formal courtesy or courtliness (shown to be closely associated with gentilesse by J.W. Nicholls200) may be one of the many meanings of ‘cleanness’, such an important concept elsewhere in the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x. In this story that seems to test knightly courage in actions it is courtesy in words that is most often praised by other characters, and trauthe in the sense of loyalty to one’s word that is tested. King Arthur is not seen engaged in deeds of knightly valour. Celebrating Christmas and New Year before the quest, he is said not to eat on such a day 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 79
er hym deuised were Of sum auenturus þyng, an vncouþe tale. (ll.92–94)
—until a tale of adventure has been related to him, not before he has accomplished one. When none of Arthur’s knights rises to the challenge, the Green Knight incredulously demands:
Where is now your sourquydrye and your conquestes, Your gryndellayk and your greme and your grete wordes? (ll.311–312)
Gawain responds, but the emphasis is initially on his courtesy rather than his courage; he asks Arthur’s permission to leave his seat, if it isn’t discour- teous and doesn’t displease the queen (ll. 345–346). He is given the chance to feel sourquydrye (pride), to conquer and be ferocious and angry (gryndellayk and greme) on his journey to find the Green Knight, but his fights with monstrous woodmen, giants, and dragons, as well as more ordinary animals, are catalogued rather than described, so that they have the effect of the purely conventional required decoration of the journey narrative that merely links two dramatic episodes.
So mony meruayl bi mount þer þe mon fyndez Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþe dole. Sumwhyle wyth womez he werrez and with wolues als, Sumwhyle wyth wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez, Boþe with bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle, And etaynez þat hym anelede of þe heʒe felle. (ll.718–723)
In comparison with the descriptions of Bertilak’s castle, the hunting, and the feasting, this is sparse. The cold, sleety weather is vividly evoked, and Gawain’s sufferings are clear, so that we understand his longing for and pleasure in the luxuries of court life. Inside the castle, it is not Gawain’s prowess in arms for which he is acclaimed, and which the inhabitants hope to learn from him, but his manners and ability to converse of courtly love.
‘Now schal we semlych se sleʒtez of þewez And þe teccheles terms of talkyn noble. [….] I hope þat may hym here Schal lerne of luf-talkyng.’ (ll.916–927) 80 S. BYRNE
Gawain is the ideal type of courtliness, an avatar in David Crouch’s terms. Crouch argues that though chivalry became a self-conscious code to an extent overseen by ‘conductors’, it grew out of the uncodified and invisi- ble norms of the habitus. In the twelfth century, it was not imposed or taught by didactic literature but by living or fictional examples.201 By the time of the Gawain-poet, there existed conduct manuals of chivalry and courtesy such as the Ordene de chivalerie,202 but Gawain in Gawain and elsewhere is represented as an exemplar, an avatar of both perfect manners and amour Courtois, talkyn noble and luf-talkyng.203 That the Green Knight shows mercy to yet reproaches Gawain (for breaking his trauthe in the exchange game) suggests that the qualities associated with the newer conception of chivalric behaviour—formal cour- tesy; ability to play the courtly games, whether of courtly love, hospitality, or entertainment; and refinement—are being privileged over the old: bravery, disregard of personal safety, and dogged determination to com- plete a quest. Gawain might be seen as the embodiment of the ideal upper- class man. He speaks like a courtier, he plays the game of courtly love; he fights (off-stage) and shows loyalty to Arthur and courage. He is perfect in his five wits and the five fingers with which he will fight for good, but he is not perfect. Being too much the model of courtesy, treating the pact with Bertilak’s lady as though it were an episode in a French Romance, has resulted in a failure of trauthe to Bertilak, and Arthur, and his own hon- our. This alignment with the courtesy of Continental Romances is tacitly criticised in the response of the court to Gawain’s penitent confession of why he is wearing the green girdle:
alle þe court als Laʒen loude þerat. (ll.2513–2514)
Both sets of qualities require obedience, whether to the rules of courtesy or the liege lord, and the story follows convention in this, but whereas, for example, Malory’s knights also owe obedience to God, and generally seem more pious, Gawain, though he performs the religious duties required by the canonical hours and calendar, seems to regard these as little different from the secular activities that punctuate the day and the year.204 The reader is invited to juxtapose competing codes and scales of priori- ties throughout the narrative, particularly through the trope of the game. Arthur’s court is young, and much taken up with story, drinking, and play. Arthur wants to hear of a marvel and is boyish in his enthusiasms: ‘He 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 81 watz so joly of his joyfnes, and sumquat childgered’ (l.86); after the Green Knight has left: ‘Gawan watz glad to begynne þose gomnez in halle’ (l.495) and is warned that though ‘men ben mery in mynde quen þay han mayn drynk’ (l.497), that won’t stop the year turning and the end com- ing. That we speak of the exchange game and the beheading game suggests that the narrative makes a parallel between the games played at court fes- tivals and the events at the castle and the Green Chapel. On the one hand, this would diminish Gawain’s actions from high deeds of chivalry to the equivalent of blindman’s bluff or a tournament fought with rebated weap- ons; on the other, it would still suggest that Gawain didn’t abide by the rules, didn’t play up and play the game. Following Gawain’s return to Arthur’s court, the courtiers could be seen as practising courtesy in hiding Gawain’s shame in plain sight by adopting the girdle, but equally their picking up on the mark of untrauthe as a fashion accessory, and ignoring Gawain’s fault, could mark them as being of the newer order, a class more concerned with surface than depth. This may be hinted at in the initial description of the court, which focuses on the youth and beauty of the courtiers and their pastimes, adding almost as an after-thought that it would be hard to find another such bold band of warriors. The king lies at Camelot
With mony luflych lorde, ledez of þe best— Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer— With rych reuel oryʒt and rechles merþes. Þer tournayed tulkes by tymez ful mony, Justed ful jolilé þise gentyle kniʒtes, Syþen kayred to þe court, caroles to make; For þer þe fest watz ilyche ful fifteen dayes, With alle þe mete and þe mirþe þat men couþe avyse: Such glaum ande gle glorious to here, Dere dyn vpon day, daunsyng on nyʒtes— Al waz hap vpon heʒe in hallez and chambrez With lordez and ladies, as leuest him þoʒt. With all þe wele of þe worlde þay woned þer samen, Þe most kyd knyʒtez vnder Krystes Seluen And þe louelokkest ladies þat euer lif haden, And he þe comlokest king, þat þe court haldes, For al watz þis fayre folk in her first age, On sille, Þe hapnest vnder heuen, 82 S. BYRNE
Kyng hyʒest mon of wylle— Hit were now grete nye to neuen So hardy a here on hille. (ll.38–59)
In Romance, refined speech and manners set apart the gentil or noble from the villein or churl and distinguish the noble foundling from the lower-class foster-family. It is no longer enough to ride into the dangers of the Wirral in winter to face a gigantic magical foe, and flinching from the anticipated death blow can be easily forgiven; what can’t as easily be over- looked is failure of courtesy, the defining mark of gentilesse. Though at Bertilak’s castle, Gawain has acted as a model of courteous manners, an external quality of gentility, here he represents the older tradition, bleakly and despairingly insisting that, as Benson says, he has lost his honour.205 John Burrow uses the ‘blot on the scutcheon’ not just as a convenient colloquial phrase but also to point out the connection between the hon- our of a knight and his heraldic achievement, represented as a device on his shield. Burrow points out that as the representative of Arthur’s court and the Round Table, Gawain takes the honour of the court and the fellowship of knights with him to Castle Hautdesert.206 The Green Knight acknowledges that it is not only Gawain’s personal honour and pride but that of the Round Table that he has tested. He has tried to
assay þe surquidré, ʒif hit sith were Þat rennes of þe grete renoun of þe Rounde Table. (ll.2457–2458)
Gawain’s public display of personal knightly honour is tarnished and so is that of the fellowship and court:
For mon may hyden his harme bot vnhap ne may hit, For þer hit onez is tachched twynne wil hit neuer. (ll.2511–2512)
—but the reaction of the gentil class is laughter. However much chivalric and courteous codes are tarnished in the action of Gawain, they are not dismissed as entirely debased and anach- ronistic.207 Whilst the representation of the chivalric knight in Romances is ‘too obviously open to the charge that, outside literature, chivalry really was no more than a polite veneer, a thing of forms and words and ceremonies which provided a means whereby the well-born could relieve the bloodiness of life by decking their activities with a tinsel gloss’,208 the 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 83 knight, nonetheless, remains a powerful figure and chivalry an important concept in the social imaginary. The knight-hero of Romance overcomes spells, deceit, and his own fears; he performs the convention of depar- ture on a quest, successive adventures, success, and return. The ambigui- ties and indeterminacies of Gawain invite question and doubt but do not replace the chivalrous high-born knight as the ideal hero or the court as the ideal society. The justification for the tax of 1379 refers to the great troubles and perils arising from the many enemies surrounding the country (‘les grantz meschiefs et perils apparantz par les enemys qi nous sont environez toutz partz’), and the great perils and troubles arising from the great wars by land and sea (‘les grantz perils et meschiefs du roialme parmy les grandes guerres apparantz par terre et par meer’).209 This is one of many reminders that the country needed fighting men (leaving aside that the majority would not have been knights) and that there existed a stratum of society trained to fight and to lead, who must be maintained by the labour, or the funds, of the other strata. However sceptical the non-knightly classes might have been about the contempo- rary behaviour and morals, and contemporary function, of the knightly classes, and however resistant they may have been to paying for them, Arthurian Romance remained popular. It offered a fictionalised history ‘which had a compelling interest for a knightly audience, because it seemed to catch the very essence of chivalry, to offer a reflection of themselves and their world not quite as it was but as they would have had it be in terms of prowess and riches, and spiced with magic and mag- nificence to add to the excitement’.210 As Amtower and others have shown, however (see earlier), Arthurian and other Romances were not owned only by those who idealised the past they represented. It is pos- sible to see the attraction of the magic, magnificence and adventure and the failings of the hero.
Poor Gentils and Gentry Poverty is of course relative and subjective. In addition to the figure of the hungry, rag-clothed and oppressed peasant, medieval writing also represents the ‘poor’ squire and knight as well as the elective poverty of some religious orders. Poverty among the upper classes is used to criticise extravagance and corruption, as well as to show that impoverishment, like hunger in Piers Plowman, can be a spur to action. Dinah Hazell shows how the impover- ished and mad Ywain learns a moral lesson about his duties and responsibili- 84 S. BYRNE ties as a knight, and about altruistic as well as mutually beneficial acts.211 The requirements of the performance of gentility were expensive. To demon- strate his high status, the well-born landowner might maintain a large household, dress magnificently, entertain lavishly, offer generous gifts, and give large amounts to the church and the poor. Some expenditure had tan- gible or intangible benefits; the show of wealth and power could foster advantageous allegiances and marriages, bringing more wealth and power, as well as good reputation, but overspending could result in a loss of all of these. Spendthrift knights, as discussed by Hazell, appear in a number of romances including Ywain and Gawain, Sir Amadace, and Sir Launfal. In Yawain and Gawain, Ywain’s poverty and madness come about because of his choice of chasing renown through deeds of chivalry with Arthur and his knights rather than attending to the wife, Alundyne, and lands he has won.212 He is persuaded by Gawain that
if þou ly at hame, Wonderly men wil þe blame. Þat knyght es nothing to set by, Þat leves al his chevalry And ligges bekeand in his bed, When he haves a lady wed. (ll.1455–1460)
Ywain promises to return to Alundyne after a year, but breaks that prom- ise. Seeking reward, whether fame or other, from chivalry doesn’t benefit him at all, and he loses everything. Decried as a traitor to Alundyne, he goes mad. It is only after he acknowledges his folly and changes his ways that he can be a true noble.
I was a man, now am I nane; Whilom I was a nobil knyght And a man of mekyl myght; I had knyghtes of my men ʒe And of reches grete plente; I had a ful fayre seignory, And al I lost for my foly. Mi maste sorow als sal þou here: I lost a lady þat was me dere. (ll.2116–2124)
As the ‘Knight with the Lion’, who does good deeds without expecta- tion of reward or acclaim, and with some help from one of Alundyne’s 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 85 maidens, whom he has rescued, Ywain demonstrates his fitness to return to Alundyne and assume control of his lands and social position. The hero of the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace is a characteristic spendthrift knight.213 Amadace is brought to recognise himself in the corpse of a merchant who once
Hade riche rentus to rere. And euiryche ʒere thre hundrythe powndee Of redy monay and of rowunde. (ll.141–143)
—but has been left unburied and rotting because he had died in debt to another merchant. He has spent his wealth, his wife tells Amadace,
Sir, on gentilmen and officers, On grete lordus, þat was his perus, Wold giffe hom giftus gay. Riche festus wold he make, And pore men, for Goddus sake, He fed hom euyriche day. Quil he hade any gud to take, He wernut no mon, for Goddus sake, Þat wolnotte onus say nay. (ll.148–156)
The dead merchant has spent like a noble, and improvidently, perhaps from social pretension.214 Seeing himself in this improvidence, Amadace feels compassion, and in paying the dead merchant’s debt and enabling him to be buried not only performs a charitable act but also reciprocates the merchant’s earlier charity. Now impoverished by the loss of his final £10, Amadace has nonetheless performed his own status as knight, and his fortunes are subsequently restored by supernatural agency of the dead man. Amadace could not have true kinship with the merchant, however, and should not accept largesse from him, but, fortuitously, the merchant is ‘reincarnated’ in the gentil status of White Knight, who brings about the restitution. That restitution is again not entirely altruistic, however. In keeping with tradition, a ‘forwart’ (l.502) is offered; Amadace and the White Knight will
part betwene vs toe Þe godus þu has wonun and spedde. (ll.503–504) 86 S. BYRNE
The White Knight doesn’t claim his half of the goods until Amadace has both wife and son, and then claims half of them. Amadace, having kept to the honourable course of giving his last wealth to eradicate another man’s shame, must now choose between honour, keeping his promise, happi- ness, and personal loyalty to his wife and child. His wife’s loyalty to him prompts her to avoid his loss of ‘wurschip in londe’ (l.744) and to offer herself and her child for halving. Amadace agrees, keeping his word and his honour, and the White Knight relents. The moral seems to be that no man is an island, so must give charitably and have compassion for others, but expectations of reciprocation, whether spiritual or material benefit, are not unreasonable, and promises must be kept. At the same time, though status demands largesse, it must be kept within bounds. More overtly critical of the knightly classes than Arthurian Romance is the gentry Romance. Whereas the genre of Romance and many iterations of Romances have Continental sources, this subgenre, as Michael Johnston says, grew from English soil, ‘where the emergence of the gentry—a socio- historical phenomenon not witnessed in other European countries—cre- ated the specific parameters within which these new motifs emerged’.215 The central protagonist of these works often comes from the land-owning but not noble class, a provincial knight or holder of a relatively insignifi- cant country manor. Johnson points out that these heroes may have an income greater than the majority of their gentry readers but that the dif- ference is of degree, not of kind, deriving from their lands and not at the behest of the king.216 Some gentry Romances provide a wish-fulfilment fantasy of the hero moving from the manor to the court; others emphasise the superiority of the provincial, independent life to the life of the court, or tacitly argue for the right of the gentry to be ranked with the aristoc- racy. Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle,217 part of the Northern Gawain Group of texts, is a useful gentry Romance to follow the discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it does the latter, offering ‘an alter- native to the courtly, comparatively exclusive version of aristocracy repre- sented by Arthur and his minions’.218 Pollack argues that the term ‘carl’ in northern dialects may not signify low-born or having low manners but retain the meaning ‘man’.219 Nonetheless, the outward appearance of the carl and his past deeds against Arthur’s knights make him seem the antith- esis of the courteous and chivalric nobleman, and he announces his behav- iour as that of a carl or churl. In his hall,
her no corttessy þou [Gawain] schalt have, But carllus corttessy. (ll.277–278)220 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 87
His household includes ‘gresly’ beasts: a wild bull, a boar, a lion, and a bear (ll.225–228); like the Gawain Poet’s Green Knight he is a giant two yards across the shoulders and nine in height (ll.257–259); he too sets a series of tests for his visitors; he too punishes transgression. Like Sir Bertilak, he is wealthy, lives in comfort, and displays his affluence as well as his piety in hearing mass each day. His nine-gallon cup is of gold (l.295), his daughter is richly dressed and plays a harp with gold pegs (l.434), and he gives expensive gifts to his visitors (ll.559–567) and entertains Arthur royally and lavishly (ll.604–648). Rather than the tool of a sorceress, how- ever, he is autonomous, having made a vow (l.518), and rather than giving hospitality to the great model of courtesy, Gawain, he teaches the churlish knight Kay and Bishop Baldwin. When they fail his tests of courtesy, by pushing out the carl’s foal to make room for their own horses (ll.304– 330), they each receive a ‘boffet’ at ‘grete spede’ (ll.307–318), an echo of the Green Knight’s blow at Gawain, but here not held back, whereas Gawain receives thanks for taking the foal in, drying him with his own mantle, and urging him to eat (ll.343–354). The tests continue, and Gawain does the bidding of the carl each time, finally sleeping with the carl’s daughter. Pollack sees the carl’s ambiguous status as making him a candidate for social mobility, one whose social aspirations ‘are marked and embodied’ in his beautiful, richly dressed, and accomplished daughter, ‘who becomes a literal and metaphorical icon of his wealth and status’.221 In this view, in marrying Gawain, the daughter gains her father entrance to the nobility not by bloodlines but by achievement. Johnston, however, argues that the carl has taught the courtiers that provincial knights deserve a place among the highest echelons of society, and that when Arthur ennobles the carl, making him Lord of Carlisle and a knight of the Round Table (ll.629–632), this ‘has managed to widen the court’s definition of aristocracy, a triumph that this Romance’s gentry audience would, one imagines, have found gratifying’.222
Notes 1. For a discussion of different theories of social stratification and their application to the later Middle Ages, see S.H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Rigby’s analyses use the framework of closure theory. 2. See, for example, David Aers, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’, Harriet E. Hudson, ‘Construction of Class, Family, and 88 S. BYRNE
Gender in Some Middle English Popular Romances’ and Britton J. Harwood, ‘Building Class and Gender into Chaucer’s Hous’ in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds, Class and Gender in Early English Literature, Intersections Series (Bloomington and Indianapolis IA: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 59–75; pp. 76–94; pp. 95–111. 3. In the translation of the Consolation of Philosophy. See The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols, eds Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. In the ‘Item Alia’ following the Maccabees homily. Electronic edition Ælfric’s Homilies on Judith, Esther, and the Maccabees, ed. Stuart D. Lee (1999). http://users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/kings/main.htm ll.724–743. 5. Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium, ed. L.C. Bethmann, MGH SS7 (Hannover, 1846), pp. 393–489. Cited in T.M. Riches, ‘Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai-Arras, the Three Orders and the Problem of Human Weakness’ in John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones, eds, The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 122–136 (122–124). 6. In Adalbéron de Laon: Poème au roi Robert, ed. and trans. Claude Carozzi, Les classiques de l’histoire de France au Moyen Âge 32 (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1979) ll.295–301. 7. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. x. 8. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 354. 9. 1 Hen V c 5, The Statutes of the Realm, 1235–1713, 10 vols (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1810–1822) II, p. 171. 10. Brogyntyn II.i, fo. 190r, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Attributed to Dame Julia Berners. Quoted in Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 2. Johnston notes that this version is singular in including ‘gentleman’ as a rank permitted to hunt with hawks, p. 4. 11. ‘Edward III: October 1363’ in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, eds Chris Given-Wilson, Paul Brand, Seymour Phillips, Mark Ormrod, Geoffrey Martin, Anne Curry and Rosemary Horrox (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), British History Online http://www.british- history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/october-1363. 12. Given-Wilson et al., op. cit., https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no- series/parliament-rolls-medieval/april-1379. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 89
13. Nigel Saul defines the essential elements of estates satire, not all of which will be present in all iterations, as ‘enumeration of the estates of society, a lament over their shortcomings, the philosophy of the divine ordination of the three principal estates, and finally an attempt to prescribe remedies for their defects’. ‘The Social Status of Chaucer’s Franklin, a Reconsideration,’ Medium Ævum, 52.1 (1983), 10–26 (10). This follows Ruth Mohl’s definition, which adds to the third element ‘the dependence of the state on all three estates and the necessity of being content with one’s station’. The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), pp. 6–7. 14. D.S. Brewer, ‘Class Distinction in Chaucer’, Speculum 43.2 (April 1968), 290–305. 15. Strohm, op. cit., p. x. 16. For a summary of publications on the problematic label ‘Alliterative Revival’, see Michael S. Nagy, The Alliterative Tradition in Early Middle English Poetry (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), pp. 7–20; 231–233. 17. Emily Steiner, ‘Commonalty and Literary Form in the 1370s and 1380s’ New Medieval Literatures VI (2003), pp. 199–222 (213). 18. Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Late Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 2. 19. Amtower, op. cit., p. 5. Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 39 (Amtower’s note). 20. Amtower, op. cit., p. 7. 21. Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate and their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 11. 22. Paul Strohm, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made The Canterbury Tales. (London: Profile Books, 2014), pp. 196–197. 23. Bert Kimmelmann, ‘The Trope of Reading in the Fourteenth Century’ in Ian Moulton, ed., Reading and Literacy: In the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Tournhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 25–44 (25). 24. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 29. 25. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 26. 26. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 29. 27. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 30. 28. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 31. 29. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 35. 30. Andrew Taylor, ‘Into His Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England’ in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds, The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: 90 S. BYRNE
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 48. Kimmelmann’s note, op. cit., p. 35. 31. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 264. Kimmelmann’s note, op. cit., p. 35. 32. Alistair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 4. 33. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 533, III, ll.1331–1336. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 34. Kimmelmann, op. cit., p. 44. 35. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); ‘Aurality’ in Paul Strohm, ed., Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 68–85. 36. Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), pp. 44–45. Arner cites Siân Echard, ‘Pre- texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ Medium Ævum 66.2 (1997), pp. 270–287; Michael G. Sargent, ‘What do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’ in Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney, eds, Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 205–244; and Derek Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works’ in Siân Echard, ed., A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 73–97. 37. See Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling 1340– 1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 38. See Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989). 39. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, Marcus Ostermann, Oliver Plessow and Gudrun Tscherpel, eds, Transforming the Medieval World: Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Middle Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 40. Arner, op. cit., p. 31. 41. Amtower, op. cit., p. 11. 42. Amtower, op. cit., pp. 27–28. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 91
43. Wendy Scase, ‘Latin Composition Lessons, Piers Plowman, and the Piers Plowman Tradition’ in Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, eds, Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 34–53 (37). 44. Arner, op. cit., p. 1. 45. Arner, op. cit., p. 2. 46. Ibid. 47. Amtower, op. cit., p. 29. Susan Hagen Cavanaugh, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England: 1300–1450’, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation 1981. Amtower’s note. 48. Richard de Bury’s dates are given as 1285–1345 by E.C. Thomas in the preface to his edition of the Philobiblon, The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury (London: Chatto and Windus, 1909), p. x. 49. De Bury, op. cit., p. 6. 50. De Bury, op. cit., pp. 8–9. 51. De Bury, op. cit., p. 19. 52. Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1397, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Haward Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 245. 53. John Gower, Confessio Amantis in John Gower’s English Works, 2 vols, ed. G.C. Macaulay (1900); rprt (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1957) II, pp. 479–480. Subsequent refer- ences will be to this edition. For a discussion of the variations of this sec- tion of the work, see Siân Echard, ‘Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis’ in Richard Firth Green and Linne Mooney, eds, Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin in Honour of A.G. Rigg (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 99–121. 54. Vox Clamantis in The Complete Works of John Gower, The Latin Works, ed. G.C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 3–313. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 55. Mirour de l’Omme in The Complete Works of John Gower, The French Works, ed. G.C. Macaulay, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), pp. 3–334. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 56. See Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. xxiii–xxiv and p. 12. 57. See, for example, Sarah Novak, ‘Braying peasants and the poet as prophet: Gower and the people in the Vox Clamantis’, Études Anglaises 66.3 (2013), 311–322 (314). 58. For the contemptuous and comical representation of peasants in European literature, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 133–156. 92 S. BYRNE
59. Novak, op. cit., p. 315. 60. Novak, op. cit., p. 317. 61. The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham 1376–1422, ed. and trans. David Preest (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), p. 126. 62. The Westminister Chronicle 1381–1394, eds and trans. L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 3. Hector and Harvey’s translations. 63. Walsingham refers to ‘Rustici namque, quos ‘nativos’ vel ‘bondos’ vocamus, simul cum ruralibus accolis in Estsexea’. Historia Anglicana, 2 vols, ed. Η.T. Riley. Rolls Series 28.1 (London: Longman, 1863–1864) I, p. 454. Preest translates this as ‘in Essex, the peasants, whom we call “villeins” or “bondsmen”, together with other countrymen there’. Chronica Maiora, Preest, op. cit., pp. 120–121. 64. Walsingham, op. cit., I, p. 454; p. 456; p. 459. 65. The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, Hector and Harvey, op. cit., p. 2. 66. See, for example, the accounts of risings in East Anglia and lists of those involved, in Edgar Powell, The Rising in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). 67. Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 224. 68. The Westminster Chronicle, p. 5. 69. Chronica Maiora, Preest, op. cit., p. 123. 70. Novak, op. cit., 321. 71. ‘Introduction’ in Ian Frederick Moulton, ed., Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 1–24 (12–13). 72. Malcolm Richardson, Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), p. 2. 73. Richardson, op. cit., p. 3. Citing Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Richardson dates the increase in royal administrative record-keeping to the end of the twelfth century. See p. 7. 74. Richardson, op. cit., pp. 6–7. 75. Chronicon Henrici Knighton, 2 vols, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Rolls Series 92 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1895) II, p. 138, quoted in Stephen Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 13–14. Justice transcribes the entries from BL MS Cotton Tiberius C.viii, fol.174a. 76. Justice, op. cit., p. 15. Justice transcribes the entry from BL Royal MS 13.E.ix fol 287a. Chronicon, p. 322. 77. Justice, op. cit., pp. 21–22. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 93
78. Justice cites Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1969), p. 113; Justice, op. cit., p. 17. 79. Justice, ibid. Citing Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 272–273. 80. Justice, ibid. Citing Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 31. 81. Chronica Maiora, Preest, op. cit., pp. 120–121. 82. Chronica Maiora, Preest, op. cit., p. 147. 83. British Library MS Harley 79, fol.3r; Bibl. Reg. 18.B. XVII; MS Trinity College, Cambridge R.3.15; in Helen Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), pp. 61–97. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 84. British Library MS Harley 2253, fol.64r, in Thomas Wright, ed., The Political Songs of England: From the Reign of John to that of Edward II. Camden Society (London: John Bowyer Nichols, 1839), pp. 149–152. 85. Janet Coleman, English Literature in History 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981), p. 62. Coleman cites the opinion of V.J. Scattergood, Poetry and Politics in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 350–378. 86. Justice, op. cit., p. 30. 87. Richardson, op. cit., p. 97. 88. Justice, op. cit., p. 30. Chronicon, p. 313. 89. Justice notes that this is Walsingham’s phrase from the Chronicon, p. 185; Justice, op. cit., p. 36. 90. Justice, ibid. 91. Henry Morley, ed. and trans., English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History of English Literature, 11 vols (London: Cassell and Company, 1887–1895) IV, p. 180. Translates Vox Clamantis I, ll.793–794. 92. Justice, op. cit., pp. 36–37. 93. Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 24. 94. Justice, op. cit., p. 37. 95. Justice, op. cit., p. 41. 96. Anon, Mum and the Sothsegger in Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition, introduction, p. 29; l.1343. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 97. See Rosamund Faith, ‘The “Great Rumour” of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston, eds, The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 43–73 (44; 58). 98. Richardson, op. cit., p. 7. 94 S. BYRNE
99. Arner cites Anne Middleton, ‘Chaucer’s New Men and the Good of Literature in The Canterbury Tales’ in Edward W. Said, ed., Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 15–56 (15); Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. 1–23; ‘The Social and Literary Scene in England’ in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–19 (9–12) and ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982), pp. 3–32 (6–7). 100. Arner, op. cit., pp. 3–4. 101. Arner, op. cit., p. 17. 102. Arner, op. cit., p. 24. 103. Arner, op. cit., p. 23. 104. Arner, op. cit., p. 22. 105. Johnston, op. cit., p. 21. 106. For a summary of various scholars’ attempts to count the total number of gentry, see Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 250–251. Johnston’s note, p. 23. 107. Johnston, op. cit., p. 22. 108. Johnston, op. cit., pp. 27–28. 109. Johnston, op. cit., pp. 30–31. 110. Sean Pollack, ‘Border States: Parody, Sovereignty, and Hybrid Identity in The Carl of Carlisle’, Arthuriana 19.2 (2009), pp. 10–26. 111. Roger A. Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 1. 112. Ladd, op. cit., p. 8. Ladd cites A.R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 92; p. 94. 113. Ladd, op. cit., pp. 13–15. 114. Ladd, op. cit., p. 16. 115. Lester K. Little, ‘Evangelical Poverty, the New Money Economy, and Violence’ in David Flood, ed., Poverty in the Middle Ages (Werl: Dietrich- Coelde-Verlag, 1975), pp. 11–26 (13). 116. Ladd, op. cit., p. 17; 19. 117. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 35. 118. Ladd cites examples from Little, Religious Poverty, pp. 35–37. 119. D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary, Medieval Cultures 33 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 132, quoted in Ladd, op. cit., p. 20. 120. Ladd, op. cit., p. 20. 121. Summarised in Ladd, op. cit., pp. 78–85. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 95
122. Quotations from Piers Plowman are to the B-Text and are taken from William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: J.M. Dent, 1978). Subsequent ref- erences are to this edition. 123. Saul, op. cit., p. 12. 124. [A]s a great part of the people, especially of labourers and serjeants, is dead in this pestilence, and some seeing the necessity of lords and the scarcity of serjeants will not serve unless they receive excessive wages, the king has ordained that every man and woman under sixty who does not live by trade or by exercising any craft or having wherewith to live or their own land with whose culture they may employ themselves, and not serv- ing another, shall be bound to serve him who requires them, and shall receive the wages which were customary in the 20th year of the reign, or in the five or six preceding years, provided that the lords be preferred before others in their bondmen or tenants so that they retain no more than are necessary, and if they will not serve when required, this being proved by two lawful men before the sheriff, bailiff, lord or constable of the town, they shall be put in gaol and kept there until they find security to serve, and if any workman, being retained, depart from the service before the end of the term agreed upon without reasonable cause or licence, he shall suffer imprisonment, and no one shall receive him or retain him in service upon the same penalty; no one shall promise to pay or exact higher wages than aforesaid upon pain of double of what is paid or exacted to him who feels himself aggrieved or to anyone who shall sue in the court of the lord of the place where the event took place. The Ordinance of Labourers. ‘Close Rolls, Edward III: June 1349’, in Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 9, 1349–1354, ed. H.C. Maxwell Lyte (London: Stationery Office, 1906), pp. 85–89. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-close-rolls/ edw3/vol9/pp85-89. 125. See ‘Edward III: February 1351’ and ‘Edward III: October 1363’, in Given-Wilson et al., op. cit., http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/ parliament-rolls-medieval/february-1351 and http://www.british-his- tory.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/october-1363. 126. David Aers, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’ in Harwood and Overing, eds, op. cit., pp. 59–75 (63–64). 127. See, for example, John Lawlor, ‘“Piers Plowman”: The Pardon Reconsidered’, Modern Language Review 45.4 (1950), pp. 449–458; Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Tearing of the Pardon’ in S.S. Hussey, ed., Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 50–75. 128. Helen Barr, ‘Major Episodes and Moments in Piers Plowman B’ in Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway, eds, The Cambridge Companion to 96 S. BYRNE
Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 15–32 (22). 129. Barr, ‘Episodes and Moments’, p. 24. 130. See Rodney Howard Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History, revd edn (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 143–153. Hilton describes the heterogeneity of peasant classes at this time. 131. S.H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 232. 132. The Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351) were attempts to produce a cheap and immobile workforce at a time when, following the plagues, wages were rising and some peasants were acquiring land. These set maximum wages and controlled workers’ move- ments. Anyone who owned less than an oxgang of land who was not employed in manufacturing was required to work for wages. The Cambridge Statute of 1388 required mobile workers to carry a letter of authorisation. 133. See Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill, CA: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 88–91. 134. St John Cassian, Institutions cénobitiques, ed. Jean-Claude Guy (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1965), pp. 420–422, quoted in Gregory M. Sadlek, Idleness Working: The Discourse of Labour from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), p. 60 n.16. Sadlek’s translation. 135. Cassian, op. cit., quoted in Sadlek, op. cit., p. 65. 136. Nicola Masciandaro, The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 117. 137. See also (XVIII, l.10). 138. Arner, op. cit., pp. 24–25. Citing Caroline M. Barron, ‘Richard II and London’ in Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie, Richard II: The Art of Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 129–154 (149). 139. Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. xi. 140. Ibid. 141. Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 31. 142. Opposed factions including those of Nicholas Brembre and John Northampton, rival candidates for Mayor at different times, whose sup- porters clashed and laid accusations and counter-accusations before and after 1381. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 97
143. Turner, op. cit., pp. 31–32. 144. Turner, op. cit., p. 55. 145. Turner, op. cit., p. 54. Turner’s references. 146. Turner, op. cit., p. 55. 147. Turner, op. cit., pp. 129–130. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 356–357. Turner’s translation and note. 148. Turner, op. cit., pp. 140–141. Citing Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith, eds, English Gilds, EETS OS 40 (London: N. Trubner, 1870), pp. 6–8. 149. Toulmin Smith and Toulmin Smith, op. cit., p. 3. 150. On judgement and punishment, see Lujo Bretano, ‘On the History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of Trade-Unions’ in Toulmin Smith and Toulmin Smith, op. cit., pp. xlix–cxcix (cxxvi–ii). 151. See Turner, op. cit., pp. 152–153. 152. Brewer, op. cit., p. 293. 153. See Brewer, op. cit., p. 292. 154. See Brewer, op. cit., p. 293. 155. Laura F. Hodges notes that as the Guildsmen belong to different crafts and guilds, their livery must suggest that they are travelling as members of a religious fraternity. Chaucer and Costume (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer), p. 135. 156. Hodges, op. cit., p. 137. 157. See Lindsay A. Mann, ‘“Gentilesse” and The Franklin’s Tale’, Studies in Philology 63.1 (1966), pp. 10–29 (11). 158. Brewer, op. cit., p. 299. Brewer’s references. 159. Brewer, op. cit., p. 302. 160. R.D. Eaton, ‘Gender, Class and Conscience in Chaucer’, English Studies 84.3 (June 2003), pp. 205–218 (216). 161. See Chapter 4. 162. Darragh Greene, ‘Moral Obligations, Virtue Ethics, and Gentil Character in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review 50.1–2 (2015), 88–107 (90). 163. Greene, op. cit., 106. 164. Greene, op. cit., 91. 165. Greene, op. cit., 89. 166. See, for example, Chaucer, ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer A Bukton’, op. cit., pp. 655–656. 167. Nancy H. Owen, ed., ‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: “Redde racionem villicacionis tue”’, Medieval Studies 28 (1966), 176–197 (178). 168. Chaucer, ‘Truth’, op. cit., p. 653. 169. Chaucer, ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’, op. cit., p. 654. 98 S. BYRNE
170. MS BL Cotton Nero A.x. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th revd edn, eds Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). Subsequent references are to this edition. 171. The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 7. 172. Helen Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Third Estate’ in Fiona Somerset, Jill. C. Havens and Derrick G. Pitard, eds, Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 197–216 (198). Barr cites Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, eds, English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols, Oxford English Texts Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–1996) IV, pp. 152–160, for examples of Wycliffite sermons which univocally declare allegiance to secular authority and the tripartite division of society. Barr, op. cit, p. 197. 173. Hudson, op. cit., p. 24. 174. Kate Crassons, Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), p. 5. 175. Ibid. 176. Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations’, pp. 198–199. Freedman, op. cit., pp. 133–156; 204–230. 177. Freedman, op. cit., p. 229. 178. ‘Edward III: April 1376’ in Given-Wilson et al., op. cit., http://www. british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/april-1376. The editors’ translation. 179. Crassons, op. cit., p. 12. 180. Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations’, p. 199. 181. Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations’, p. 200. SeeEnglish Wycliffite Sermons, IV, 115. Barr’s note. 182. See Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations’, p. 213 and Freedman,op. cit., pp. 223–224. Freedman notes the association between ploughshare and cross. 183. Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations’, p. 215. 184. Russell A. Peck, ‘The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings’ in Siân Echard, ed., A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 215–238 (235). 185. Anon, Richard the Redeless in Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition, pp. 99–134. 186. See Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 150–158. 187. See Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 6. 188. See Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 26 and note to ll.72–95, p. 295. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 99
189. Subsequently Gawain. MS BL Cotton Nero A.x. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th revd edn, eds Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). Subsequent references are to this edition. 190. Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 2. 191. Ibid. 192. Andrew and Waldon associate trauthe or trawthe with religious as well secular morality, signifying loyalty to God as well as ‘acceptance of one’s place in the world’, op. cit., p. 24. 193. Andrew and Waldron, op. cit., p. 23. 194. W.R.J. Barron, “Trawthe” and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered. A Thematic Study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 17. 195. For a discussion of the magical landscape and the castle as fantasy, see Barron, op. cit., pp. 6–7. 196. Andrew and Waldron, op. cit., p. 24. 197. Henri Dupin, La courtoisie au moyen âges: d’après les textes du XIIe et XIIIe siècle (Paris: A. Picard, 1931) cited in Mann, op. cit, pp. 12–14. 198. Mann, op. cit., p. 11. 199. As noted by J.W. Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: A Study of Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p. 9. 200. Nicholls, op. cit., p. 7. 201. David Crouch, ‘Chivarly and Courtliness: Colliding Constructs’ in Peter Coss and Christopher Tyerman, eds, Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 32–48 (42). 202. ‘Les Roman des Eles and the Anonymous ‘Ordene de Chevalerie’: Two Early Old French Didactic Poems, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983). 203. Nicholls notes that this is not a medieval term. Op. cit., p. 7. 204. See C. David Benson, ‘The Lost Honor of Sir Gawain’ in J.M. Foley, ed., De Gustibus: Essays for Alain Renoir (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 30–39 (35). 205. Benson, op. cit., p. 34. 206. J.A. Burrow, ‘Honour and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ in Essays on Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 117–131. For the importance to the king of the familia regis, see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 12–37. 100 S. BYRNE
207. For the argument that chivalry was no longer an extant force in society, but remained a force in the mind, see Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (London: Arnold, 1924), pp. 56–67. 208. Keen, op. cit., p. 3. 209. Given-Wilson et al., op. cit., https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no- series/parliament-rolls-medieval/april-1379. 210. Keen, op. cit., p. 115. 211. Dinah Hazell, Poverty in Late Middle English Literature: The Meene and the Riche (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 23–27. 212. Anon, Ywain and Gawain, eds Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Subsequent references will be to this edition. 213. Anon, Sir Amadace, in Sir Amadace and The Avowing of Arthur: Two Romances from the Ireland MS, ed Christopher Brookhouse (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1968). Subsequent references will be to this edition. 214. See Hazell, op. cit., p. 38. 215. Johnston, op. cit., p. 53. 216. Johnston, op. cit., p. 57. 217. I refer throughout to the A text, MS Brogynton II.i. ff.12–26, rather than the ballad. 218. Johnston, op. cit., p. 64. 219. Pollack, op. cit., p. 18. 220. Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle in Two Versions, ed., Auvo Kurvinen (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1951). Parallel edition of Version A and Version B. Version A, Syre Gawene and the Carle of Carelyle, pp. 114–159. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 221. Pollack, op. cit., p. 18. 222. Johnston, op. cit., p. 66.
Bibliography 1 Hen V c 5, The Statutes of the Realm, 1235–1713, 10 vols. London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1810–1822 II. Adalbéron de Laon: Poème au roi Robert, ed. and trans. Claude Carozzi, Les clas- siques de l’histoire de France au Moyen Âge, 32. Paris: Les belles lettres, 1979. Ælfric’s Homilies on Judith, Esther, and the Maccabees, ed. Stuart D. Lee, 1999. Amtower, Laurel, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Late Middle Ages. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 101
Anon, ‘Richard the Redeless’, in The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr, pp. 99–134. ———, ‘Sir Amadace’, in Sir Amadace and The Avowing of Arthur: Two Romances from the Ireland MS, ed. Christopher Brookhouse. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1968. ———, Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle in Two Versions, ed., Auvo Kurvinen. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1951. ———, Ywain and Gawain, eds Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Arlinghaus, Franz-Josef, Marcus Ostermann, Oliver Plessow, and Gudrun Tscherpel, eds, Transforming the Medieval World: Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Middle Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Arner Lynn, Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Barr, Helen, ‘Major Episodes and Moments in Piers Plowman B’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, eds Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 15–32. ———, ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Third Estate’, inLollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England, eds Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard, 197–216. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003. Barron, W.R.J., “Trawthe” and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered. A Thematic Study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Benson, C. David, ‘The Lost Honor of Sir Gawain’, in De Gustibus: Essays for Alain Renoir, ed. J.M. Foley. New York: Garland, 1992, pp. 30–39. Boethius, The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols, eds Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brewer, D.S., ‘Class Distinction in Chaucer’, Speculum 43 (2 April 1968), 290–305. British Library MS Harley 2253, fol.64r, in The Political Songs of England: From the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. Thomas Wright. London: Camden Society; John Bowyer Nichols, 1839. British Library MS Harley 79, fol.3r; Bibl. Reg. 18.B. XVII; MS Trinity College, Cambridge R.3.15; in The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr, 61–97. London: J.M. Dent, 1993). Burrow, J.A., ‘Honour and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Essays on Medieval Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 117–131. Cavanaugh, Susan Hagen, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England: 1300–1450’, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation, 1981. Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed., ed. Larry D. Benson, Based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer III, ed. F.N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 102 S. BYRNE
Coleman, Janet, English Literature in History 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers. London: Hutchinson, 1981. ———, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Crassons, Kate, Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Crouch, David, ‘Chivalry and Courtliness: Colliding Constructs’, in Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, eds Peter Coss and Christopher Tyerman. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009, pp. 32–48. de Bury, Richard, Philobiblon, The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, ed E.C. Thomas. London: Chatto and Windus, 1909. Duby, Georges, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Dyer, Chrisopher, Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Eaton, R.D., ‘Gender, Class and Conscience in Chaucer’, English Studies 84, no. 3 (June 2003), 205–218. Echard, Siân, ‘Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis’, in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin in Honour of A.G. Rigg, eds Richard Firth Green and Linne Mooney, 99–121. (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Faith, Rosamund, ‘The “Great Rumour” of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’, in The English Rising of 1381, eds R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 43–73. Freedman, Paul, Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Gillespie, Alexandra, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate and Their Books, 1473–1557. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gower, John, Mirour de l’Omme in The Complete Works of John Gower, The French Works, ed. G.C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899, pp. 3–334. ———, ‘Vox Clamantis’, in The Complete Works of John Gower, The Latin Works, ed. G.C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902, pp. 3–313. ———, Confessio Amantis, in John Gower’s English Works, 2 vols, ed. G.C. Macaulay (1900); rprnt, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1957, II. Green, Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Greene, Darragh, ‘Moral Obligations, Virtue Ethics, and Gentil Character in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review 50, no. 1–2 (2015), 88–107. Harwood, Britton J., and Gillian R. Overing, eds, Class and Gender in Early English Literature, Intersections Series. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hazell, Dinah, Poverty in Late Middle English Literature: The Meene and the Riche. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 103
Hilton, Rodney Howard, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History, rev. ed. London: Verso, 1990. Hodges, Laura F., Chaucer and Costume. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer. Hoeppner Moran, Jo Ann, The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Hudson, Anne, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Huizinga, Johan, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries. London: Arnold, 1924. Johnston, Michael, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Justice, Stephen, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Keen, Maurice, Chivalry, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Kimmelmann, Bert, ‘The Trope of Reading in the Fourteenth Century’, in Reading and Literacy: In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Ian Moulton, 25–44. Tournhout: Brepols, 2004. Knighton, Henry, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1397, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Haward Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Ladd, Roger A., Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Langland, William, ‘Piers Plowman’, in The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt. London: J.M. Dent, 1978. Lawlor, John, ‘“Piers Plowman”: The Pardon Reconsidered’, Modern Language Review 45, no. 4 (1950), 449–458. Little, Lester K., ‘Evangelical Poverty, the New Money Economy, and Violence’, in Poverty in the Middle Ages, ed. David Flood. Werl: Dietrich-Coelde-Verlag, 1975, pp. 11–26. ———, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Mann, Lindsay A., ‘“Gentilesse” and The Franklin’s Tale’, Studies in Philology 63, no. 1 (1966), 10–29. Masciandaro, Nicola, The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Minnis, Andrew, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mohl, Ruth, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933. Morley, Henry, ed. and trans., English Writers: An Attempt Towards a History of English Literature, 11 vols, IV. London: Cassell, 1887–1895. 104 S. BYRNE
Moulton, Ian Frederick, ed., Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. MS BL Cotton Nero A.x, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th rev. edn, eds Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Nagy, Michael S., The Alliterative Tradition in Early Middle English Poetry. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. Nicholls, J.W., The Matter of Courtesy: A Study of Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985. Novak, Sarah, ‘Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the Vox Clamantis’, Études Anglaises 66, no. 3 (2013), 311. Orme, Nicholas, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England. London: Hambledon Press, 1989. Owen, Nancy H., ed., ‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: “Redde racionem villica- cionis tue”’, Medieval Studies 28 (1966), 176–197. Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, eds Chris Given-Wilson, Paul Brand, Seymour Phillips, Mark Ormrod, Geoffrey Martin, Anne Curry, and Rosemary Horrox. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval/ october-1363. Pearsall, Derek, Old English and Middle English Poetry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Peck, Russell A., Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. ———, ‘The Politics and Psychology of Governance in Gower: Ideas of Kingship and Real Kings’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004, pp. 215–238. Pollack, Sean, ‘Border States: Parody, Sovereignty, and Hybrid Identity in The Carl of Carlisle’, Arthuriana 19, no. 2 (2009), 10–26. Powell, Edgar, The Rising in East Anglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896. Richardson, Malcolm, Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011. Riches, T.M., ‘Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai-Arras, the Three Orders and the Problem of Human Weakness’, in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, eds John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 122–136. Rigby, S.H., English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Sadlek, Gregory M., Idleness Working: The Discourse of Labour from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004. 2 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 105
Saul, Nigel, ‘The Social Status of Chaucer’s Franklin, a Reconsideration,’ Medium Ævum 52, no. 1 1983, 10–26. Scase, Wendy, ‘Latin Composition Lessons, Piers Plowman, and the Piers Plowman Tradition’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, eds Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013, pp. 34–53. Steiner, Emily, ‘Commonalty and Literary Form in the 1370s and 1380s’, New Medieval Literatures VI (2003), 199–222. Strohm, Paul, ed., Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———, Middle English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———, The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made The Canterbury Tales. London: Profile Books, 2014. The Ordinance of Labourers, ‘Close Rolls, Edward III: June 1349’, in Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 9, 1349–1354, ed. H.C. Maxwell Lyte, 85–89. London: Stationery Office, 1906). British History Online http://www. british-history.ac.uk/cal-close-rolls/edw3/vol9/pp85-89. The Westminister Chronicle 1381–1394, eds and trans. L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Turner, Marion, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth- Century London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Usk, Adam, The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given- Wilson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Walsingham, Thomas, Historia Anglicana, 2 vols, ed. Η.T. Riley. Rolls Series 28.1. London: Longman (1863–1864) I. ———, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham 1376–1422, ed. and trans. David Preest. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005. Wenzel, Siegfried, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature. Chapel Hill, CA: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Woolf, Rosemary, ‘The Tearing of the Pardon’, in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. S.S. Hussey. London: Methuen, 1969, pp. 50–75. CHAPTER 3
The Early Modern Period
Introduction This section, like others, covers a long period of time in order to consider class in relation to changing attitudes to authorship and the ownership, circulation, and value of texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eigh- teenth centuries. Although this is not a sociological or bibliographical work, any study that examines the transmission of texts in terms of socially produced artefacts must owe a debt to scholars such as D.F. McKenzie, Arthur F. Marotti, and Jerome McGann. Whilst this section will not pro- vide detailed descriptions of the manuscripts and books, scribal hands, typography, or binding, which are so significant in the reception of the texts it discusses, it will touch on the social and material conditions of the transmission of poetry. The section also offers some discussion of poetry from each side of the Civil War, politically and temporally, bearing in mind Christopher Hill’s reflection that in the early seventeenth century, ‘as the élite and popular cultures pulled apart, men became more conscious of class differences’.1 Hill gives popular and coterie theatres as his examples. Drama, including verse drama, cannot be included in this study, but lyric and other poetry provides plenty of examples of that sense of division.2 As in the discussion of the Middle Ages, to use the term ‘class’ of the Early Modern period is anachronistic but helpful, and as in the Middle Ages, reiterations of attempts to justify a narrowly defined social order suggest the inadequacy of that imposed model. As Raymond Williams
© The Author(s) 2020 107 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_3 108 S. BYRNE states, ‘hegemony is not singular’; its internal structures are ‘highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended’; at the same time, ‘they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified’.3 It is helpful therefore to employ not a definitive singular hege- mony but ‘a model which allows for this kind of variation and contradic- tion, its sets of alternatives and its processes of change’. The term ‘bookseller’ rather than ‘publisher’ is used other than in quo- tations to indicate the trade that could include printing and selling of books, as well as stationery, remedies, and preventatives. Following the argument of Spencer Dimmock, this section treats the Early Modern period in England as from c.1500 to c.1700, as the time during which a capitalist economic system was consolidated in England, and the period when a fully capitalist social system emerged. Dimmock’s premise is that rather than simply an economic system, capitalism is ‘a specific historical form of social system or society with its own specific economic logic, fundamentally distinct from earlier historical forms of society—and indeed from non-capitalist societies in different parts of the world today’.4 Capitalism’s unique structure of class relations determines its economic system and patterns of economic development. It is ‘the struggle to make a living by opposed interests within the established struc- ture of class relations that determines the nature of economic develop- ment (or non-development)’. Dimmock sees capitalism as political rather than economic, since in a capitalist system few will own and farm land that provides their basic needs; the survival of the majority of the population will be dependent on others who provide waged employment, a relation- ship fundamentally different from feudalism, absolutism, or slavery. The political relationship is in that dependency, ‘and the consequent imbal- ances in power in the work-place’.5 Dimmock places the origin of capital- ism in England at 1400, and a capitalist English society in place by 1600. Taking this end date, his work is here considered in relation to the Early Modern rather than the Medieval period, but it will be helpful to sum- marise his tracing of the process from the fifteenth century. Dimmock notes that around 1400 much of the land that had been part of the demesnes of feudal lords, approximately 20–30% of the best land, was transferred to the wealthier free peasants. Following the risings of 1381 and the gradual decline of serfdom and control over the agrarian labour force, the upper classes looked for new sources of income to maintain their position. Whereas past production strategies had been geared to subsistence, the new leaseholders were compelled to produce 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 109 competitively for the market. Also, from the middle third of the fifteenth century, the lords and their leasehold farmers uprooted a large number of English peasantry so that by the 1530s, England’s economic and demographic patterns were no longer those sustained on the continent. Whilst some subsistence farming continued, and the process was neither straightforward nor consistent across the country, around 1600, large capitalised farms created from fragmented peasant-organised, subsis- tence-based farming had become the typical feature of English agrarian society. By 1600, the political and economic interests of locally powerful farmers, a commercial aristocracy, and a centralised state government had ‘become firmly committed to the future of the new system’.6 Christopher Hill finds in these new relationships the origins of the English Revolution. In addition to providing the needs of the owner, in the Middle Ages, large estates ‘maintained with their surplus agricultural produce a body of retainers who would on occasion act as soldiers, and so were the basis of the political power of the feudal lords’.7 In the sixteenth century, the development of the capitalist mode of production within this feudal structure led landowners ‘either to market that portion of the pro- duce of their estates which was not consumed by their families, or to lease their lands to a farmer who would produce for the market’. This meant that landowners came to regard their estates in a new light: as a source of money profit, of profits that were elastic and could be increased. Rents once fixed by custom and other charges were ‘“racked up” to fantastically high levels’. Hill writes of the moral outrage this generated:
In time, the needs of growing capitalism produced a new morality – the morality of ‘God helps those who help themselves’. But in the sixteenth century the idea that profit was more important than human life, so familiar to us that we have lost our sense of moral indignation, was very new and very shocking.8
Contemporary morality found it outrageous and even against the teaching of Scripture that those who could not pay the raised rents could be dispos- sessed, as can be seen in poems such as Robert Crowley’s ‘Pleasure and Payne, Heaven and Hell’:
But such Scriptures you coulde not broke As bade you give ought to the pore; You wyshed them out of the boke; 110 S. BYRNE
But you were suer to have in store Plentie of scriptures, evermore, To prove that you myght aye be bolde Wyth your owne to do what you woulde9
Paul Slack notes that during the seventeenth century, whilst deep pov- erty declined, shallow poverty increased at least as much, that is, there was less poverty resulting in there being inadequate food for survival but more poverty which resulted in inadequate clothing, shelter, and other com- modities.10 Patricia Fumerton argues that, in part, incomes were supple- mented by the rise of domestic industries, the manufacturing of items such as pins, buttons, and stockings which could be made and sold with little financial outlay or training. Some sales would have been through middle- men, but others were made directly, leading to the existence of more itin- erant chapmen peddling portable goods.11 Following Steve Hindle’s report that the proportion of dispossessed agricultural workers in England grew from 20% to 30% between 1520 and 1650, Fumerton estimates that by the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury it had grown to 60%.12 An Act of 1572 attempted to distinguish between legitimate wanderers, those in or likely to be in gainful employ- ment, vagrants, and unlicensed beggars. Making the distinction was at the discretion of local authorities, and it was not until 1662 that an Act of Settlement formally recognised mobile workers as other than vagrant, and therefore not criminal, and not until 1667 that an Act encouraged move- ment of workers to areas where there was a demand. The settled, or housed, ‘unstable working poor’, those in occupations more prone to serial or unpredictable unemployment, constituted 30–50% of the popula- tion.13 Labourers were dispossessed by a number of factors including ris- ing population and unemployment, decrease in the number and size of noble households which once would have employed dozens of servants and others, rising rents, the conversion of copyhold tenure to leasehold, high agricultural prices, and low wages.14 This led to what Fumerton calls ‘impressions of an epidemic of masterless men’ and repeated legislation against vagrancy and work-shy begging. The representation of the vagrant in this period blurs the distinction between migrant labourer, migrant arti- san, beggar, and criminal, and depicts a powerful criminal alternative soci- ety which has its own rules, occupations, and language. This myth, particularly prevalent during the economic depression of the 1590s–1600s, capitalised on contemporary fears of a vagrancy crisis, and ostensibly 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 111 warned the respectable of the disguises these thieves and con-men adopted, and of the unintelligible argot they employed to gull the unwary, or the foolish who had not availed themselves of such guides to criminal behav- iour and interpretations of the criminal register. Writers on Early Modern literature, particularly drama, drawing on the work of Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux, link the literary trope of trans- formation and slipperiness of identity to Early Modern economic theory. Noting that ‘instead of supplying a measure for commodities’, money is ‘interchangeable with them’, and that accumulating wealth has become a matter of serial transformation between money and commodities and vice versa, both theory and literary texts begin to scrutinise the nature of money, commodity, and identity.15 If an individual’s status and reputation, and therefore identity, is bound up with this exchange, identity may be as much reified and mutable as coin and commodity.16 In attempting to establish firmly the authority of the Anglican Church, the homilies produced by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1547 (extant to 1553 and from 1558, followed by a second book under Queen Elizabeth in 1563, with an additional homily in 1570) advocated the continuance of the strict secular hierarchy modelled on the ordering of heaven:
Almightie God hath created & appointed all thinges in heaven, yearth and waters in a moste excellent and perfect ordre. In heaven he hath appoynted distinct or several orders and states of Archangelies and Angels. In yearth he hath assigned and appointed kynges, princes, with other gouernors under them, in all good and necessary ordre. The water aboue is kept and raineth doune in due time and ceason. The sunne, mone, sterres, rainbow, thunder, lightning, cloudes, and all birdes of the aire do keep their ordre. The yearth, trees, seedes, plantes, herbes, corne, grasse and all maner of beastes, kepe themselves in their ordre. […] Euery degre of people in their vocacion, cal- lyng and office, hath appoynted to them their duetie and ordre. Some are in high degre, some in lowe, some kynges and princes, some inferiors and subiectes, priestes and laimen, maisters and seruauntes, fathers & chyldren, husbandes and wifes, riche and poore, and euery one haue nede of other: so that in all thinges is to be lauded and praysed the goodly ordre of God, without the whyche, no house, no citie, no common wealth can continue & endure. For where there is no right ordre, there reigneth all abuse, carnall libertie, enormitie, syn and babilonicall confusion. Take awaye kynges, princes, rulers, magistrates, iudges and such states of God’s ordre, no man shall ride or go by the high waie unrobbed, no man shall slepe in his awne house or bed unkilled, no man shall kepe his wife, children & possessions in 112 S. BYRNE
quietness, all thynges shall be common, and there must nedes folowe all mischief and utter destruction, both of souls, bodies, goods, common wealthes.17
The rule of kings and princes and their appointed officials is naturalised by the analogy of the natural world. There is a fleeting echo of the interde- pendency of the estates that had been emphasised in the Middle Ages, and an apparent appeal to reason: without order there is no authority, without authority there is no law, without law there is no safety. The reference to kings, princes, inferiors and subjects, priests and lay- men, masters and servants, high and low, rich and poor is not adequate to describe Tudor, Elizabethan, or later Early Modern English society. The term ‘order’ used by Cranmer refers both to proper organisation (voca- tion, calling, and office) and ‘degree’, a term he also employs to denote rank without much indication of how this is defined, though he does men- tion both occupation and wealth. How the social hierarchy was in fact organised, who was on which stratum, and how far could they move in either direction was difficult to codify. After the death, attainder, or exile of the nobility loyal to Richard III and the ennobling of some of those who had fought for Henry Tudor, there followed the creation of the ‘Tudor new man’, the court official or civil servant who served the bureau- cracy of government, might be a graduate of the universities, and might well be of what would later be called the middling sort. Some of these, including Thomas Cromwell, were themselves ennobled. Whilst this brought prosperity to some and, some years of economic decline apart, people in the period had a better standard of living than before, this did not create a settled or unified society or put to rest fears of popular insur- rection. Some of the same tropes employed in Middle English chronicles and other texts to describe the common people appear in texts of the six- teenth century. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590) represents the rebels who attack Gynecia, Philoclea, and Pyrocles as ‘an unruly sort of clowns and other rebels’ who, far from having a common cause, are ‘so many as they were, so many almost were their minds’.18 They are ‘knit together’ only in ‘madness’, and like the rebels of the 1381 risings in Gower’s work, they are almost inarticulate: ‘Some cried “Take”; some “Kill”; some “Save”. […] Everyone commanded, none obeyed’. When together, ‘never bees made such a confused humming’.19 This confusion comes from their having been asked to state their common complaints, which leads only to expressions of self-interest, suspicion, and conflict. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 113
They fall into ‘direct contrarieties’, artisans against ploughmen, vine-labourers, and farmers, peasants against ‘citizens’: ‘merchants, pren- tices and cloth-workers, because of their riches disdaining the baser occu- pations, and they because of their number as much disdaining them; all they scorning the countrymen’s ignorance, and the countrymen suspect- ing as much their cunning’.20 Eventually, the rebels fall into factions and factions within factions, and even kill those with whom they are in alliance. Finally, they are killed by Basilius, Pyrocles, and Musidorus. Fears of insurrection were of course realised in the 1640s. The follow- ing section will touch on poems that were part of the enormous outpour- ing of printed matter participating in the challenge to the king’s divine right to rule, the Civil Wars and the print wars, and the Cromwellian Commonwealth.
Manuscripts and Printed Books With the advent of printed books, vellum and parchment did not immedi- ately give way to paper, or scribes to compositors. Harold Love and Arthur F. Marotti argue that although the alleged ‘stigma of print’ may have made the older medium more attractive to high-status authors or to the authors who sought the patronage of those high in rank, our model should rather be ‘one of different experiences of readership and authorship under- gone by the same individuals at different times and under different cir- cumstances’.21 Secular scribes22 or scriveners,23 professional copyists, who had existed in the Middle Ages,24 did, however, largely replace monastic scribes.25 Peter Beal remarks on the persistent satirising of scribes and scriveners, who are derided as low in origin and scant of education. This ‘touches on a nerve of strong popular feeling and prejudice. It may even articulate a deep and widespread social anxiety’ concerning the dispropor- tionate power and influence wielded by men of humble status that ‘may seem even a blatant infringement of the social order itself’.26 Satirists ‘— smarting at the inequity of what they saw as intrinsically unimportant crea- tures wielding power—would see fit to remind even the highest on the scale that they were no more than mere mercenary mechanics’.27 An exemplum of this is given as Robert Julian, described by Beal as the prin- cipal purveyor of manuscript verse in the mid to late seventeenth century. Julian employed scribes to copy poems, lampoons, and political satire, which he carried about London and sold in coffee houses, taverns, and other meeting places. Beal argues that Julian not only offended politically, 114 S. BYRNE by selling both Whig and Tory propaganda, but also socially. ‘Mocked as a lumpish, ignorant, dull-witted, ulcerous, sottish man, over-fond of wine and brandy’, Julian ‘had effectively cheapened manuscript culture itself. He had appropriated it for ignoble uses’. Rather than enable gentlemen to retain the sense of privilege and exclusivity that manuscript circulation conferred, ‘he brought manuscripts to the streets, as if they were chap- books’.28 Scribal errors notwithstanding, manuscripts, particularly if spe- cially commissioned, had a status to which mass-produced printed books could not aspire. Richard McCabe notes that William Caxton’s gift to Margaret of Burgundy of a copy of the first book printed in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (Bruges, 1473–1474), was different in kind from the presentation to Philip of Burgundy of the manuscript of Raould Lefèvre’s original. ‘Lefèvre had presented Philip with a unique manuscript; Caxton presents Margaret with one copy of a mechanically produced print-run that may have numbered anything from three to six hundred.’29 It is possible that the illustration known only in one existing copy of the Recuyell, depicting Caxton making the presentation to the duchess, was intended to add a unique quality to her one of many copies.30 Beal suggests that scribes downplayed their role as tradesmen and the function of the commercial scriptorium in producing multiple copies of texts, which, together with the high cost of manuscripts, helped to main- tain the fiction of exclusivity.31 The owner of an expensive manuscript ‘felt in some way that he was privy to some unclearly defined coterie, or privi- leged network’. Love and Marotti argue that manuscript transmission of poetry com- municates two contradictory messages: ‘first, that such work was socially occasional and ephemeral, and, second, that it was worth preserving’.32 As most lyrics were social communications such as ‘paying of compliments, epistolary communication, witty extemporaneous performance, the send- ing of New Year’s greetings, and congratulations on births or condolences on deaths’, initial circulation of these as individual poems or groups of poems was convenient and favoured. ‘Manuscripts containing poetry were mainly associated with the universities, the Inns of Court, the court, the aristocratic or middle-class household, and familial or social networks or scribal communities.’ This encouraged ‘competitive versifying’ and answering and rival poems on a particular topic.33 Just as the preservation and dissemination of words in manuscripts was to an extent received with suspicion in the earlier period, so printed works, and especially their proliferation, were suspect in the sixteenth century and 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 115 thereafter. In giving authors an audience more readily and widely, printing was said by some, including some authors, to be encouraging the ignorant or talentless to write. In a diatribe against those who rush to publish poetry once they can count 14 syllables but do not study the classical forms, Roger Ascham complains that the ‘shoppes in London’ are ‘full of lewd and rude ryme’ and that the ‘ripest of tong be readiest to write’ and that many ‘dayly in setting out books and balettes make great shew of blossomes and buddes, in whom is neither, roote of learning, nor frute of wisdom at all’.34 Similarly, the printer, now in league with the scribe, is reviled for producing unauthorised printed copies of manuscripts in circu- lation, from which the author earns nothing, and which are often inaccu- rate. More than 50 years later, complaints persist. George Wither bemoans that whereas booksellers (described as excrement and vermin) in the past merely took drops of blood from authors’ bodies, they now ‘feed upon him like the third Plague of Egypt’.35 Wither had particular cause for com- plaint, as the Stationers Company had blocked a large source of revenue. In 1623, James I had granted Wither the rights to his Hymns and Songs of the Church for 51 years and required that this be bound with every copy of the English Psalter. The Stationers refused and there followed what Michael Hattaway has called a battle of competing monopolies, the author’s and the Stationers’.36 The Stationers boycotted Wither’s work and he ‘became one of the earliest English writers to articulate a concept of intellectual property vested in the author rather than the publisher’.37 Tellingly, Wither wrote that he was loathe to ‘sinke belowe my ranke, or to live at the mercy of a creditor’.38 That emphasis on rank suggests the fear of the declassé profession of author, as does an anonymous response to Wither’s attack on the Stationers: ‘They are too Mercenary that write bookes for Money, and theire covetousnes makes theire labours fruitles, and disesteemed’.39 McCabe states that it was ‘precisely such a loss of “esteem” that so many “gentle” authors feared’. Wither’s situation could have arisen from the complexities of publish- ing in the period. Few books went from author to reader via just one busi- ness; few printers continued to act as Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde had. Authors often sold their work outright to one person or company who employed another to print it and another to distribute it. The Stationers Company evolved from a loose organisation of scriveners which became incorporated in 1577. That incorporation gave the crown some ability to control publication, to censor or silence heresy and sedition. It also gave the Stationers two advantages: a quasi-legal status entitling them to search 116 S. BYRNE printing shops and confiscate unauthorised publications, and a monopoly. Stationers were required to obtain a licence for publication from the authorities, a warrant was issued and recorded in the Hall Book, and the company then owned the book. No further payment was made to the author for reprints or new editions, unless the latter were revised. If a manuscript came into possession of the company, it could be printed and sold without payment to the author. This meant that few authors owned exclusive rights to their works, and whilst some authors had a beneficial relationship with their respective booksellers,40 not all such businesses prospered,41 by no means all authors could make a living from sales of their works, and some indeed underwrote publication in the case of exten- sively illustrated works, or received no payment other than copies of the works that they could sell or use as gifts to patrons.42 Though print publication immediately allowed a potentially wide distri- bution, it did not necessarily confer the taint of commerce, and publica- tion in manuscript form did not necessarily entail a severely limited distribution either in time or place. Though there was little or no stigma attached to producing works for publication, ‘profiting from it was a dif- ferent matter’.43 In the case of the translations by Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers (1440–1483) printed by Caxton,44
there could never be the remotest suggestion that the Earl received payment from the mercer. Rather, it is the printer who receives ‘manifolde benefetes and large rewardes’ from the author. The printer could market his wares, but the author, whether noble or ‘gentle’, could not yet admit he had wares to market. As a result the pursuit of literary patronage remained as impor- tant in the court of Henry VII as in former times, and the same sort of annuities, gifts, and pensions awarded to Lydgate and Hoccleve continued to be sought and proffered.45
A.S.G. Edwards cautions against generalisations about ‘the stigma of print’ in courtly milieus:
[I]t is worth reminding ourselves of the self evident: that literary manuscript culture as it renewed itself in the second half of the sixteenth century, was to continue throughout the seventeenth century in parallel to print culture. But there may be some value in reflecting, however cursorily, on the begin- nings of those dual cultures and the early accommodations that were made between them.46 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 117
Rivers could afford to take the prestige of publishing for the benefit of humankind, and leave the monetary profit to Caxton. Other courtier- authors chose not to publish in the sense of making their work public, but circulated manuscripts of poems among coteries or friendship networks.47 Such a courtier from a later generation than Rivers, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder (1503–1542), left poetry in a number of manuscripts: the Egerton Manuscript (BL, MS Egerton 2711), which has holograph authorial cor- rections; the ‘Blage’ Manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin MS 160, pts 2 and 3); and the Devonshire Manuscript (BL, MS Additional 17492), which Love and Marotti describe as a product of a courtly coterie circula- tion of texts, both Wyatt’s and other authors’, including some of the man- uscript’s transcribers.48 This was not the kind of coterie that revolved around a patron who influenced the subjects and styles of the poems, but a more loose association of friends connected to the court. Wyatt did send his work to people of higher status—his translation Quyete of Mynde (1528) was a New Year’s gift to Catherine of Aragon49—but his early need for patronage was as a courtier and diplomat rather than as a poet. Without the constraints of pleasing a patron in his poetry, he had greater freedom in choosing his subjects, and coterie circulation enabled a work such as the poem headed ‘V. Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me inimici mei’ (‘Circa Regna Tonat’) to be read with rather less fear of repercussion than had it been made public. Nonetheless, with the exception of the verse epistles to Francis Bryan and John Poyntz, Wyatt avoided naming anyone, though there are clues in the pun on the palindromic Anna in ‘What wourde is that’ and references to Brunet. The extent to which Wyatt treated printing or public transmission with lordly disdain is hard to estab- lish. More than a generation after Wyatt, however, other poets are confid- ing or revealing doubts and anxieties about commercial publication. Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) writes to Gabriel Harvey:
I was minded for a while to have intermitted the uttering of my writings, leaste, by overmuch cloying their noble eares, I should gather a contempt of my self, or else seeme rather for gaine and commoditie to doe it, for some sweetnesse that I have already tasted.50
Others use the common subterfuge of announcing that their work was seen through the press without their agreement by a friend or a printer who is driven to this by his consciousness of the public good derived 118 S. BYRNE thereby. The production of Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes (1563) is ostensibly due to a friend’s deciding ‘bouldely to hazard ye printing hereof’ from a manuscript left in his care whilst Googe was away from London.51 Googe himself declares in his dedication that it is known that, though he has been ‘earnestlye reqyired’, he has been loath to allow these ‘tryfles of mine’ to come to light.52 His protestations and justifica- tions continue for many lines, suggesting some persistent anxiety about possible consequences to his standing of this venture.
Patronage Marotti points out that in this period, the realm of the aesthetic, later considered autonomous, was not separated from other discourses, and literary production, the relationship between writers, readers, booksellers, and patrons, was the result of explicit negotiation. ‘[E]veryone acknowl- edged that literary communication was socially positioned and socially mediated: styles and genres were arranged in hierarchies homologous with those of rank, class and prestige.’53 Given both the social and financial dependency of most authors who chose to have work printed, patronage was a necessity for social position and stability and some income. That many needed to or did court patronage can be seen from the epideictic dedications of printed works of the time.54 In addition to the prospect of appointments, or, more rarely, annuities, a permission to dedicate a work given by a person of higher status than the author implied endorsement of the work and might offer some protection against accusations levelled at the contents. It also ostensibly brought author and patron together in literary enterprise. Literary patronage was not new in the sixteenth century. The title page of the Recuyell states that the translation and printing by Caxton have been ‘at the comaundement of the right hye, myghty and vertuouse pryn- cesse, hys redoubtyd lady, Margarete by the grace of God Duchesse of Bourgoyne, of Lotryk, of Braband et cetera’. Client-patron relations oper- ated on several levels in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, so that patronage might come from church, court, faction, or individual. John Skelton, King’s Poet from 1512, attempted to obtain patronage from Cardinal Wolsey (daringly, given that Wolsey could have heard of his satires on the cardinal, then only in manuscript form55) and from the king in his dedication of the presentation copy of The Garlande of Laurels (ca. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 119
1495); Henry VIII (with hindsight, ironically) dedicated his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (1521) to Pope Leo X to obtain a papal title. Skelton’s references to patrons real and imagined, like his obsessive insis- tence on the title of Laureate, may be the attempt at aggrandisement by a lower-class author who had no court post higher than that of tutor. In his Garlande, Skelton depicts himself crowned by a group of noble ladies, Elizabeth Howard, Countess of Surrey (l.769) and her daughters, Lady Elizabeth Howard (l.864), Lady Mirriel (Muriel) Howard (l.877), and Lady Anne Dacre (Dakers) (l.892), in addition to a number of untitled ladies, suggesting the court’s recognition of his talent and placing himself within court circles. As McCabe notes, that poem itself is almost a parody of a client’s flattering portrayal of the virtues and accomplishments of a patron in that the hyperbolic praise given by The Queen of Fame, Occupation, Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer, is all for Skelton himself. Very possibly the first example of a female patron and client relationship is that of Margaret Clifford and Æmilia Lanyer. Lanyer’s poems are inter- esting not only for the lines of female patronage and influence they trace, in their praise of Queen Anne, Queen Elizabeth, the Countess of Cumberland, the Countess of Kent, the Countess of Pembroke, Arbella Stuart, and other women living and dead, and the emphasis on the central- ity of the mother-daughter relationship, but also in the way in which Lanyer uses the formal modesty and apparently subordinate position of both the woman and the client to assert both ownership of her texts and that which is due to her as a writer. The importance of the performance of modesty by Early Modern women writers is emphasised by Tamara Hervey, who finds it impossible to overstate, particularly for women entering pub- lic discourse, and Margaret Hannay notes the additional importance of this convention in the case of women who were defying a prescribed role.56,57
Pudor, not modestus, is the modesty of women. […] Modesty was a virtue for men as well, but for them modestus or ‘keeping due measure’ was the appropriate Latin cognate—in men, modesty connoted probity, self- government, and reason. In the hierarchical secular world, modesty helped men negotiate the dual roles of governing and being governed. From a religious perspective, modest activity meant acting with faith, humility, and charity, well aware of one’s own fallen nature. For men, modesty was largely a matter of moderation. Immoderate men were characterized as effeminate; they were governed by the body when they should be governing it.58 120 S. BYRNE
For women, the avowal of modesty entails disavowal of authorship or wor- thiness to be an author, not, as for some men in the period, disavowal of desire for public circulation. That this was a stance or formal convention must be indicated by the fact that women did write and did circulate their writing. For Lanyer, encomia not only enabled her to praise her patrons and to display her (mostly past) court connections but also to remind readers of illustrious women authors, and thus deflect censure. Her poems about virtuous and literary women (of high rank) and to ‘the Vertuous Reader’ align her with status as well as virtue, and court further patronage. Her employment of modesty tropes in the prefatory material to her collec- tion Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), including the dedicatory poems and addresses, is seen by Patricia Pender not as excusing her presumption but as impressing the reader by the magnitude of her project.59 Pender shows that ‘To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie’ uses the figure of chiasmus to link the supposed excellence of Queen Anne with women’s writing, and states that the queen’s grace will excuse the writing’s defects.60
Renowned Empress, and great Britaines Queene, Most gratious Mother of succeeding Kings; Vouchsafe to view that which is seldome seene, A Womans writing of diviniest things: Reade it, fair Queene, though it defective be, Your Excellence can grace both it and me. (ll.1–6)
The use of ‘grace’ here and in ll.35–36 (later) could simply refer to the intangible quality of the queen’s character, but it has connotations of something more material to be conferred in reciprocation for the praise, and the impressive project.
That so these rude unpollisht lines of mine, Graced by you, may seeme the more divine.
The patron-poet relationship is of course only one axis of poetry transmis- sion, and only one possible source of epitext. The printer or anthologiser employs this medium of communication to the reader most explicitly in the prefatory address of Tottel’s Miscellany. For Marotti, this collection is significant in marking Richard Tottel’s self-conscious translation of manu- script-circulated verse into print, with a sense of some of the differences between the media.61 It is, however, also important in being an explicit address to the reader. The authors of the poems are notably absent, Wyatt 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 121 and Surrey, for example, being long dead by 1557, so that the antholo- giser claims authority for the work as collector, editor, arranger, and pro- moter, and acknowledges not a single wealthy and/or upper-class patron of the poet and therefore patron of the art of poetry, but the reader, the book-buyer. Patronage had not ended in 1557, and indeed can be seen to be active in different ways in the present, but the address indicates that the uncertain beneficence of the patron was not the only way for poetry to earn (some) money, and that therefore more paying customers than the patron must be courted. This might be more in the interest of the book- seller and printer (as has been seen, sometimes the same business) than the author, as few authors received more than a single payment for their work. Perhaps more important is the particular stratum of society that the address represents as the Miscellany’s readership. Tottel makes play with the term ‘gentle’. The putative book-buyer is ‘gentle Reder’, whereas the courtly circles who did not have the work printed but kept it to themselves are ‘ungentle horders’.62 The poets are learned, and the learned reader will defend their ‘learned frendes’ the poets from the less learned, whose swin- ish grossness might make them scorn the poems. Like the ‘silver fork’ novels of the nineteenth century, commercial printings of poems of court life promise the middle classes for a moderate fee a glimpse of high life. Similarly, the popular form of the miscellany both reflected contemporary taste and offered its contents as a readily imbibed cultural digest which would imbue the reader with correct taste.63 The same collection might be presented in different ways to different markets. A letter to a patron, Lord Compton, from Henry Disle, the pub- lisher of The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576; 1578), emphasises the social status of the authors collected therein, and the ‘delight’ to be found in the volume, whereas the second edition announces itself as ‘pleasant and profitable for all estates’.64 Marotti notes that whereas the profit and delight derived from literature should apply to all, they divide on class lines.65 Glamour by association could come from fellow authors as well as patrons. Marotti notes the ‘snob appeal’ of the full title of another miscel- lany: The Phoenix Nest Built vp with the most rare and refined workes of Noble men, woorthy Knights, gallant Gentlemen, Masters of Arts, and brave Schollers. Full of varietie, excellent invention, and singular delight. Never before this time published (1593).66 This work could ‘appeal unashamedly’ to ‘a well-to-do clientele’ largely through the dignity conferred by the inclusion of Sidney’s sonnets. 122 S. BYRNE
The Professional Author For McCabe, authorship in the sixteenth century ‘was not yet a profession but an activity that might attract the attention of powerful promoters’.67 Edwin Haviland Miller, however, finds the beginnings of the professional author in England in the 1580s, arguing that earlier Humanists had writ- ten from idealism and for utilitarian purposes, whereas in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, young middle-class men, ‘fresh from the universities or the wars’ came to London to earn money from writing.68 Without patronage, the less well-off would-be authors ‘were in effect ser- vants of the stationers’. Miller asserts that the Elizabethan publishing industry was dominated by middle-class writers and printers, which ‘for better or for worse, gave to literature a middle-class foundation’.69 Yet aristocratic and other upper-class authors were writing, circulating their writing within an exclusive coterie, and others were paying for scribes to copy that writing for circulation to a somewhat wider audience. The pro- fessional author who wrote for money existed alongside the amateur or non-commercial one. Miller writes about the university-educated Elizabethan sons of merchants and artisans rather as Richard Hoggart writes about the scholarship boy of the twentieth century.
The plight of the university graduate in many respects was more serious than that of the tradesman-author or the soldier-author. The artisan at least had his trade and sometimes his livery company to shelter him. […] They were not interested in gracing arms with learning […] nor would they demean themselves in the trades of their fathers. Furthermore, by common agree- ment university graduates qualified as gentlemen. Yet the label of ‘gentle- man’ was virtually meaningless, since it included everything and in effect nothing. Thus, ‘a Marlowe or a Greene is a young man uprooted. […] He is detached from his class but without the means of becoming fully accred- ited in any higher class, yet with heightened aspirations; discontent and disil- lusion stalk him from the moment he steps out into the world’.70
Miller argues that though these educated young men came to London to earn money from writing, they discovered that to survive they would need other employment, and he provides a list of Elizabethan authors’ other jobs: Harvey as a Cambridge don; Spenser in government service in Ireland; Daniel as a tutor and groom of the privy chamber; Marlowe a ‘professional informer’; Munday, Nashe, and Lyly as ‘hacks of the episcopacy’; Lodge as a physician; Marston, Hall, Gosson, Meres, and Bastard as clergymen. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 123
L.C. Knights concurs with this picture of a surplus of writer-scholars, attributing to this (together with other factors) the prevalence of melan- choly in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing.71 Bacon’s letters are given as an example demonstrating that ‘the small level of success which followed the highest aspirations was a fundamental cause of melancholy and discon- tent’.72 Although Miller distinguishes between class-migrant educated professionals and genteel- or noble-born amateurs, he shows that the ama- teurs were no more fully dedicated to authorship than the professionals, each having other pursuits and careers at court, at war, or on their estates.73 He argues that the amateurs, in keeping with Tudor ideals of ‘utility’, dis- missed their literary endeavours as trifles requiring little effort, and there- fore demeaned the work of the professionals. An author who spun airy fancies with effortless ease was one thing; one who sweated over a piece in order to sell it was another, a labourer. In order to satisfy those who believe that gentlemen should not pub- lish, George Pettie argues that a scholar should not hide his learning, or practise the hypocrisy of false modesty:
Those which myslike that a Gentleman should publish the fruites of his learning, are some curious Gentlemen, who thynke it most commentable in a Gentleman, to cloake his arte and skill in every thing, and to seeme to doo all thynges of his owne mother witte as it were, not considering how we deserve no prayse for that which God or Nature hath bestowed upon us, but only for that, which we purchace by our owne industry.74
Poetry and the Court The earlier Tudor courts attracted the products of the Humanist educa- tion of the kind established by, for example, John Colet and William Lily. Poets such as Wyatt were scholars and linguists as well as writers, diplo- mats, and courtiers. Wyatt’s familiarity with European literature enabled him to translate and transform the poetry of Francis Petrarch into new English forms, and palace life (when he was not abroad on diplomatic mis- sions) among cultivated people of both sexes in concentric and sometimes overlapping circles of privilege and concomitant lack of privacy, encour- aged a poetry of subjectivity and intensity. The rivalries, jealousies, and dangers of court life are chillingly depicted in poems such as ‘Circa Regna Tonat’, ‘Stand Whoso List’, and ‘Mine Own John Poynz’, and there are few mentions in Wyatt’s poetry of the lower orders other than ‘my moth- er’s maids’ in his satire of ‘The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse’. 124 S. BYRNE
The later Tudor courts, hosting pageantry, ceremony, diplomatic, and other official entertainments and display, providing occasions for epideic- tic works’ encomiastic address, and requiring leisure pursuits for unoccu- pied courtiers, could produce and consume a lot of semi-public as well as private poetry. Much of that poetry would have been in English, though the education of the courtiers would have included Latin composition and rhetoric. The ability to compose poetry also became a mark of courtliness. Courtiers and aristocrats known for literary as much as martial accom- plishment had of course existed before: Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, is an obvious earlier example, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a later one. ‘Princepleasers’ were not exclusive to the Tudor courts but by the mid-sixteenth century these aspects of courtliness were becoming theo- rised, and had their manual. Montefeltro Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) was known in Britain in its Italian form before becom- ing available in English in Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation and its many subsequent editions.75 It influenced works such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) and, as David Starkey has shown, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Third Satire, ‘Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan’, which makes Wyatt’s friend and fellow courtier the type of Castiglione’s courtier.76 The Courtier eclipsed earlier Humanist works on courtesy and service such as Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (1529) and for David Starkey manages to unite the seemingly incompatible ethos of Humanism and court.77 The ideal courtier Castiglione represents possesses grace, self-confidence, decorum, and sprezzatura,78 the ability to produce seemingly effortless and nonchalant accomplishment. He must ‘practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be with- out effort and almost without any thought about it’.79 He should be an aid to his master but also an ornament of the court. Though his stratagems, his diplomacy, his graceful courtly manners, and his words should seem natural, they are all to be the product of artifice. G.K. Hunter points out the incompatibility between the preoccupations of a Humanist education and the requirements of court life, and therefore the adjustments that those drawn to the court as a cultural centre would have had to make.
The tradition of practical learning and ethical preoccupation which brought the Humanists to the court was met with a requirement that they use their literary gifts and forget their ideals, that they abandon their internationalist, 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 125
pacific, and misogynist impulses and become the encomiasts of tourna- ments, of hunting, and of amorous dalliance. Petrarch could complain ‘Where do we read that Cicero or Scipio jousted?’ but this reaction was hardly open to the Tudor court entertainer.80
Recipients of a Humanist university education, expecting to write politi- cally effective rhetoric, found that ‘the scope open to eloquence shrinks from statecraft through polemic to mere entertainment’ and had to ‘con- tain their sense of divine mission within the bounds of a poor pamphlet’. Hunter argues, however, that from this ‘union of learning and the need for popularity, of moral zeal and profane forms’, came ‘the greatest litera- ture our language has known’.81 The relationship between this theorised form of behaviour and theories of poetry can be seen in works such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poesie (1595) and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), which take as axiomatic that an accomplished courtier will be a master of language, even though he may not have studied the arts of rhetoric. Sidney has found
in divers smally learned courtiers a more sound style than in some professors of learning; of which I can guess no other cause, but that the courtier, fol- lowing that which by practice he findest fit test to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, though not by art: where the other, using art to show art, and not to hide art (as in these cases he should do), flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art.82
This is because the courtier has learned how to win ‘the mind and favour of the prince he serves that he can and always will tell him the truth about all he needs to know’.83 For Puttenham no training in poetic composition (ditties of pleasure) is needed other than that which teaches ‘beau sem- blant’ as the ‘chiefe profession as well of Courting as of poesie’. Like the courtier, the poet must make art seem natural: ‘wee doe allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte: that is, when he is most artificiall, so to disguise and cloake it as it may not appeare, nor seeme to proceede from him by any studie or trade or rules, but to be his naturall’.84 In Castiglione’s references to masques and other disguisings, he empha- sises that the disguise should conceal but allow clues to identity, just as the courtier’s true abilities should be disguised by an assumption of average- ness. Javitch notes Puttenham’s similar requirement that the poet both 126 S. BYRNE disguise and display meaning, through the use of rhetorical tropes to pro- duce indirection and ambiguity:
Puttenham shares Castiglione’s reluctance to provide any strict definition of good grace, his chief esthetic criterion. Nevertheless he recognizes, like Castiglione, that it relies on a conscious discrepancy between being and seeming. As the courtier’s grace derives from his various modes of decep- tion, so the grace of poetry depends on the poet’s ability to conceal aspects of his subject and delay, by indirection, the recognition of his meanings. Since language is the poet’s chief instrument in this process, to achieve grace he must exploit all the means that convey a disproportion between the literal meanings of words and their actual suggestion. The poet must therefore be expert in the use of figures because, as Puttenham puts it, ‘they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing’.85
Supporting the poet’s facility in employing this doubleness were a range of works teaching the use of rhetorical figures, published before or after Hoby’s translation, including Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric (1553) and Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1555). Doubleness and multivalence, complexity and rhetorical tropes contin- ued to be deployed in seventeenth-century poetry, but as the court moved from royal palaces to Oxford colleges, and to the field of war, poetry that might have remained in manuscript entered the wars of print; they were deployed less to ‘deceive the ear and the mind’ than to reinforce the message.
Class, the Caroline Court, and the Civil War James I was concerned with the extent to which matters of state were known and discussed outside parliament and the inner court, facilitated by the circulation of parliamentary speeches, summaries of debates, and news-sheets.86 A second proclamation noted that in spite of the first,
[w]ee are given to understand, that notwithstanding the strictnesse of Our commandement, the inordinate libertie of unreverent speech, touching matters of high nature, unfit for vulgar discourse, doth dayly more and more increase.87 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 127
This was presented as both the preservation of state secrets and policies from enemy eyes and their reservation from those unfit to judge them, the commoners. Both James and his son referred to the convention of the nation as a body with a ruler as its head, thus reserving to themselves the organs of thought (interpretation and judgement) and speech (comment, debate, and pronouncement).88 In annexing interpretation of the mon- arch’s role, the statutes, the law, and scripture on the basis of both his right and his superior understanding, the king silenced dissent before it began, in theory.89 Wither uses this metaphor in his prophetic poem Britain’s Remembrancer of 1628, (pp. 454–456) but turns it against the sovereign in Vox Pacifica, which declares that a king ‘is but a substituted-head/Made for conveniencie’ and that if the body is endangered, it has the authority ‘[t]o take one off and set another on’.90 Whereas James and Charles reserve to themselves the prerogative of proclaiming on matters of authority and rule, or of delegating some of that prerogative to peers and parliament, poets reserve the right to a peer- age of Parnassus. In ‘To Ben Jonson’,91 Thomas Carew approves Ben Jonson’s ‘chastizing hand’, which has
fix’d vppon the sotted age a brand To theyre swolne pride & empty scribbling due, It can nor iudge, nor write. (ll.1–4)
Jonson is told to take no account of the criticism of the public ‘of this dull age’ which have drawn from him ‘such an immodest rage’ (ll.23–24). He should ‘let be hurld’ on his writing anything that ‘malice can suggest’ (ll.27– 29). Crucially, Jonson is not ‘of theyre make’ (l.47), so he should not worry:
The wiser world doth Greater Thee confesse Then all men else. (ll.49–50)
Similarly, Carew counsels Davenant to disregard the disapprobation of the public following the reception of Davenant’s The Just Italian92:
Repine not Thou then, since this churlish fate Rules not the stage alone; perhaps the State Hath felt this rancour, where men great and good, Have by the Rabble beene misunderstood. So why thy Play; whose cleere, yet loftie straine, Wisemen, that govern Fate, shall entertaine. (ll.33–38) 128 S. BYRNE
Royalist Poetry
Give me that man, that dares bestride The active Sea-horse, & with pride, Through that huge field of waters ride: [and who with mere looks:] can appease The ruffling winds and raging Seas, and even: Saile against Rocks, and split them too; I! and a world of Pikes passe through93
Robert Herrick’s (1581–1674) poem presents ‘His Cavalier’94 as a man of Baroque myth, his capacities so hyperbolic as to suggest comic irony. He can glance at a turbulent sea and calm it; he can ride a (much enlarged) seahorse. The poem does not stop at imaginary feats from an emblematic painting; however, it ends on a feat that the Royalist soldier could have and perhaps would have accomplished: passing through the ranks of pikes of the opposing army. A ‘world of pikes’ could be metaphorical of a world of obstacles and adversaries, just as splitting rocks could be metaphorical of breaking through the seemingly unpass- able obstruction, particularly as Herrick uses the metaphor of rocks turning to rivers in his valedictory ‘To Dean-bourne, a rude river in Devon by which he sometimes lived’ (l.14).95 The concreteness of the reference to a contemporary weapon used by common soldiers, how- ever, suggests otherwise. The virtuous cavalier, whose cause is just, will make it through the battlefield and the world now dominated by the Cromwellian army, to the other side. Herrick’s Royalist affiliations are clear in his dedication ofHesperides (1648) to Charles, Prince of Wales. The two Charleses, as Hesperus (eve- ning star and son of dawn), are associated throughout the poems with light and fire. The very titles of poems to Charles I such as ‘To the King, Upon his Comming with his Army into the West’96 and ‘To the King to Cure the Evill’97 are set in large type,98 the first three words in block capitals. The king is hailed as ‘brave Prince of Cavaliers’, aligning him with Herrick’s figure of epic deeds (l.8), and the epigram ‘The Difference Between Kings and Subjects’ spells out the ethos:
Twixt Kings and Subjects there’s this mighty odds, Subjects are taught by Men; Kings by Gods.99 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 129
Herrick’s Georgic ‘The Hock-cart or Harvest Home: to the Right Honourable, Mildmay, Earl of Westmoreland’100 represents the rural hier- archy in its feudal form, the peasants bound to labour to feed the land- owners by the false logic that the food they grow given back to them at the harvest feast is the property of their lord, so they must grow it and give it to receive it.
Come Sons of Summer by whose toile, We are the Lords of Wine and Oile: By whose tough labours and rough hands, We rip up first, then reap our lands [….] And, ye must know, your Lords word’s true, Feed him ye must, whose food fills you. (ll.1–4, 51–52)
Herrick addresses the earl as a spectator: ‘Come forth, my lord, and see the cart’ (l.7), and the labourers with seeming camaraderie as partici- pants: ‘brave boys’, ‘Drink frollick boyes’ (l.26, l.43), and the first action the labourers must do before eating is drink to the lord’s health (l.38). In spite of this preservation of difference, the poem is a celebration of community, albeit a hierarchised community, speaking of late summer and plenty, ceremony, and the kinds of folk traditions (crowning the harvest queen, making corn dollies) frowned upon by Puritans, and so is an idealisation of a way of life that is perhaps slipping away. Similarly, the celebrations of Maying, eating and drinking, and games, and the eroti- cism, mixed as they are in Hesperides with poems in praise of the king and the young prince and about the movements of the army, associate sensual and sexual pleasures, happiness, with life before the king’s imprisonment. Herrick was (relatively late in life) a parish priest rather than a soldier, and his poems refer to the progress of the Civil War in broad-brush terms: the king’s army coming West, the prince’s presence in the West country. His rural retreat (until he was expelled from it, to return years later) was more habitual than that of other royalists who wrote from bucolic exile after working for the monarch. Following his release from prison, Richard Lovelace produced poems that criticise the kind of republicanism which allows a Puritan ethic to blight the lives of those who fought for it. In ‘To Lucasta from Prison’, Lovelace enumerates all those things for which he might have felt allegiance: peace, war, religion, 130 S. BYRNE parliament, liberty, property, reformation, and the public faith, and rejects them all in disillusionment.101
Since then none of these can be Fit objects for my Love and me; What then remaines, but th’ only spring Of all our loves and joyes? The KING. (ll.41–44)
The metaphor of Charles as sun is rehearsed:
He who being the whole Ball Of Day on Earth, lends it to all; When seeking to ecclipse his right Blinded, we stand in our owne light. (ll.45–48)
Without the king, no one can see right.
And now an universall mist Of Error is spread or’e each breast, With such a fury edg’d as is Not found in th’ inwards of th’ Abysse. (ll.49–52)
‘The Ant’ in metonymic reference to Puritanism exhibits the price of the loss of the king and his loyal upper class.
Austere and Cynick! not one hour t’allow, To lose with pleasure what thou gotst with pain: But drive on sacred Festivals, thy Plow; Tearing high-ways with thy ore charged Wain, Not all thy life time one poor Minute live, And thy o’er labour’d Bulk with mirth relieve?102 (ll.19–24)
Not all Royalists were uncritically admiring of the court or the king, any more than all Parliamentarians wanted regicide; not all positions were fixed. Wither’s politics moved away from royalism to parliamentarianism, and religion moved from Anglicanism towards Puritanism. In Britain’s Remembrancer he speaks humbly and respectfully to the king as ‘Dread sovereign’ (I p. 10) and ‘Good Sir and Highness’ (I p. 15), protests that ‘[m]y Lines are loyall though they bold appeare’ (I p. 16), and signs him- self ‘Your Majesties most loyall Subject and humble Servant’ (I p. 24). The 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 131 poem supports Charles’s view that his knowledge and understanding are superior and not to be challenged:
If in thy King, Oh Britaine, ought amiss Appears to be: twixt God and him it is, Of him he shall be judged. What to thee Pertainith it his censurer to be? (II p. 457)
He may even overrule the law for the good of the realm (II p. 474). Far from egalitarian, the poem represents Death’s triumph as a train led by King James and the departed nobility followed by aldermen and trades- men. The ‘common Rabble’ come at the back as an indistinguishable mass (I p. 224). The poem seems about to turn to the plight of the labouring poor:
Some cry, ‘the Land is poore, and cannot give’. Tis poore indeed: and yet I do beleeve Few Kingdomes are so rich. Tis poore become, [….] Tis poor if we on those reflect our eyes, On whom the labour of this Kingdome lies: Those people whom our great and wealthy ones Have rackt oppress, and eaten to the bones To fatten and adorn their carcasses. (II p. 467)
But the argument is that not enough money is being spent on the army, which the land could well afford if its wealth were not misspent and wasted. Rather than the king, the targets of the poem are the religious errors and sins which have brought the plague to Britain (in the earlier cantos), and the avaricious and over-powerful lords from whom the realm should be purged. Though in a poem published after the death of Charles I Wither sati- rises the over-powerful Stuarts, he was against the execution and criticised Cromwell. He accuses the king of having taken part in so many masques or having been represented in so many encomia as a deity that he has come to believe and regard as true.
And by [flattery] He and his Queen became So often represented by the name Of Heath’nish Deities; that, they, at last, Became (Ev’n when their Mummeries were past) Like those they represented; and, did move, Within their Sphears like, Venus, Mars, and Jove.103 132 S. BYRNE
In the petition section of the poem, it is stated that
Thou know’st O GOD! that we have no desire, To take from Him or His the Royall Throne, Or pull it lower; but to raise it higher, And set him, rather, safer there upon. (p. 149)
‘We’ love the person of the king and wish to prevent him from pursuing the mischief on which he seems bent, but he must repent and improve.
O let the King, if ever he expect, To see the Citie of his Throne, in peace, Go mourne apart, and let his thoughts reflect Upon his folly and unrighteousness. (p. 185)
The king is not the only accused, however, parliament must be called to account and purged, and members must examine their consciences (pp. 194–196). King and parliament must come together to restore a united country, and remember that they govern by the nation’s will.
Let not your King and Parliament, in One, Much lesse apart, mistake themselves, for that. Which is most worthy to be thought upon: Or, think, they are essentially, the STATE (p. 199) They must not fool themselves that the authority and privilege conferred on them gives them their own power and glory. But, let them know, ’twas for another thing, Which they but represent; and, which, ere long, Them, to a strict account, will, doubtlesse, bring, If any way, they do it wilfull wrong. For that, indeed, is, really, the Face, Whereof, they are the shadow, in the glasse. (p. 199)
The Interregnum and After The execution of Charles I and the establishment of a republic in 1649 changed the make-up and therefore the culture of the court and parlia- ment. Aristocrats who had supported the king were subject to fines and 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 133 sequestration, though some joined the new regime, and the House of Lords was abolished. Though a group of the middling sort including tradesmen, minor gentry, army officers, and yeomen were brought into power, the lower classes, including much of the army that had won the war and enabled the establishment of the Commonwealth, were still excluded. The army and ‘Army Agitators’ set up a Council of Agitators which was seen as holding out the last possibility for social reform. Partially in response, large segments of the army were sent to Ireland. The prevailing Puritan ethos of those in power further alienated the lower classes, and as David W. Petegorsky explains, there was a proliferation of primarily plebe- ian religious sects. The common people
found their expression in religious mysticism. The widespread growth of sectarian activity and mystical enthusiasm after 1640 is the unmistakeable beginning of a class consciousness that later took more definite form in revolutionary political action. Essentially, the sects were countering the ine- galitarianism that was fundamental to Puritanism. The latter, by identifying worldly success with election by the Lord, told the poor that they were damned of God because they were not of the elect. The answer of those who were told that they were condemned to abject poverty in this world and to eternal damnation in the next was to assert the essential equality of all human beings before God by denying the doctrine of predestination, and affirming in its stead that the key to salvation was revelation.104
Writing about the class of this period here becomes almost inextricable from writing about religion. As David Norbrook observes, many ‘fairly reluctant republicans were motivated more strongly by religious rather than abstract constitutional issues, with particular forms of government being secondary to the aim of godly reformation’.105 Whilst sects such as the Levellers which were organised from 1647 (largely made up of small- holders, tradesmen, artisans, and some peasants) and the Diggers (mostly labourers without land) sought to hold ownership of agricultural land in common and to establish ideal communities of equals, the emphasis in their literature is on equality of faiths and the right to worship as con- science dictates. George Winstanley’s ‘The Diggers’ Song’ gives a sense of the embattledness of such sects by enumerating those against whom the Diggers must ‘stand up’: Cavaliers, gentry, clergy, and lawyers, for whom ‘The club is all their law, to keep poor men in awe’ (l.48). The Cavaliers, 134 S. BYRNE named more frequently than the other adversaries, like them must be defeated by ‘love’ (l.56) but also by poetry:
The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys. Stand up now, Diggers all! (ll.53–55)
Petegorsky notes that the early attacks on these sects were almost as much concerned with the social as with the religious aspects of the heresies. For example, The Divisions of the Church of England (1642) states that the Familists ‘would have all things in common, not only goods and cattle but wife and children’; the Anabaptists are said to believe that ‘a Christian may not with a safe conscience possess anything proper to himself but whatso- ever he hath he must make common’106; the first parts of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646) similarly refuted schismatic religious doc- trines, but Edwards realised that the schismatics defied civil as well as ecclesiastical authority, and the third part deals with social and political doctrines. Edwards tells of preaching against ‘illiterate mechanic persons’ and demands ‘[a]ccording to all principles of Justice and Right reason, who is fittest to judge in such and such cases what is according to right reason, whether every Delinquent and ignorant Mechanic called in ques- tion (for if that may be allowed, farewell all justice, none shall be punished, nor innocent righted) or the Rulers, Judges, and settled Authority of a Land?107 Richard Carter, in The Schismatick Stigmatized (1641) fulminates against schismatics ‘ever stirring up others to Rebellion, Schisme, and Faction’.108 They ‘crie downe all our Orthodoxe Divines and set up mechanicks’. They preach (prate I should say) that all Christian liberty is lost, if we obey anything that is imposed on us by man (p. 3).109 Cromwell’s Protectorate did not banish poetry or ceremony, as can be seen in Edward Holberton’s description of the feasting and pageantry laid on for Cromwell by the City of London.110 Holberton shows that poems on the Dutch peace are steeped in imagery of restoration and rebirth, harking back to the time before the Civil War and thus perhaps not celebrating the change of government but only the end of fighting it has (finally) brought. In Ralph Bathurst’s English poem in the Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria (1654) can be seen a veiled reminder to Cromwell that the laurel-crowned victor remains obscure unless the bay- crowned poets celebrate him.111 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 135
So when Augustus with his Warlike hand Had brought home Triumphs both from Sea and Land, And (Janus Temple shut) now conquer’d more By arts of Peace, then feats of Armes before; Then swarmes of Poets came, and made him known Deckt by Their Bayes, no lesse then by his owne. As if one sacred heat did first incite Him to Atchieve great things; next, Them to Write. And thus much we have done, only to show We can be Poets when you make us so. (ll.7–16)
The Protector’s death afforded similar opportunities for the same kind of elegy and panegyric as during the monarchy, but as Holberton notes, ‘crit- ics have on the whole found them unconvincing’. Uncertain and dislo- cated, they reveal ‘the impossibility of giving any kind of intellectual or emotional coherence or promise to the event of Oliver’s death in the generic terms available to funeral panegyric’.112 The use of traditional heraldic symbols and royal iconography failed to provide ‘a stabilizing focus’ for the elegists’ disappointment. Quite soon thereafter, the return of the monarchy could be hailed by John Dryden with assertions that it had been greatly missed during a period of insanity113:
For his long absence Church and State did groan; Madness the Pulpit; Faction seiz’d the Throne: Experience’d Age in deep despair was lost To see the Rebel thrive, the Loyal crost. (ll.21–25)
The Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria followed in a tradition well estab- lished in Oxford and Cambridge. The universities had been centres for vernacular as well as Latin composition and for the production of manu- scripts and printed miscellany before the Civil War. Both printed and man- uscript commemorative poems were presented to Charles I during the 1630s, with an increasing number of poems in English. James Loxley attributes the fusion of manuscript vernacular tradition and formal neo-Latin practice of panegyric to the encouragement of Brian Duppa, Vice-Chancellor from 1632 to 1634,114 and sees the poems as associating the English language with the Stuarts, the vernacular becoming an ‘iden- tifying mark of the dynasty’, and vernacular poetry taking its place ‘in the formal relations between the university and the monarch’.115 136 S. BYRNE
English poetry was not only part of Caroline court culture; vernacular publication and manuscript circulation continued after the Civil War and the Interregnum, and the English language continued to be pro- moted. This of course was not a new endeavour. ‘The battle to get English accepted as one of the great European languages was raging in Shakespeare’s day’; Richard Helgerson ‘compares Spenser’s determination to write a great English poem with Coke’s claim that England had “no dependency upon any foreign law whatsoever”’.116 Along with interest in the status of English came interest in fixing and purifying it, most famously articulated in Jonathan Swift’s A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712).117 Theories of the origins, development, and structure of the language; increased literacy; a gradual regularisation of spelling that did not reflect regional pronunciation outside the south-east (emphasising the distance between the written standard and spoken dia- lects); and moves to stabilise the language and to impose a Latinate gram- mar were all to contribute in the following century to debates about literary language, and thus the appropriateness of non-standard English for poetry. That debate, as will be seen, continues to be articulated in the poetry of the twentieth century.
Notes 1. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 387. 2. For discussion of the interaction of middle-class and underclass in Early Modern drama and prose, see Denys Van Renen, The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern Literature (Lincoln, NA and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). 3. Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Problems of Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 37–38. 4. Spencer Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 1. 5. Dimmock, ibid. 6. Dimmock, op. cit., pp. 3–4. 7. Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640, An Essay (1940) rev. edn (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1949), pp. 22–23. 8. Hill, ibid. 9. Robert Crowley, Pleasure and Payne, Heaven and Hell: Remembre these foure and all shall be well (London: Grafton, 1551), p. 22. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 137
10. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1988), p. 39, cited in Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. xvi. 11. Fumerton, ibid. 12. Fumerton, op. cit., p. xii. Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c. 1550–1640 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 48. Fumerton’s note. 13. Fumerton, op. cit., p. xv. 14. Described by Fumerton, op. cit., p. 6. 15. Van Renen, op. cit., pp. 19–20. 16. See Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvanian Press, 2008), Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), and Brian Sheerin, Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama: Commerce, Poesy and the Profitable Imagination (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 17. Thomas Cranmer, ‘An exhortation concerning good order and obedience to rulers and magistrates’ in Certayne sermons or homilies appoynted by the kynges maiestie to be declared and redde, by all persones, vicars, or curates, euery Sundaye in their churches where they have Cure (London: Printed by Richard Grafton, 1547). Early English Books Online http://gateway.pro- quest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:10564:64, n.p. Abbreviations expanded. 18. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed., Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 379. 19. Sidney, op. cit., II 383. 20. Sidney, op. cit., II 384. 21. Harold Love and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and Circulation’ in David Lewenstein and Jorel Mueller, eds, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 55–80 (60). 22. The OED gives several definitions of the word scribe. The earliest recorded is ‘[a] member of the ancient Jewish class of professional copy- ists, editors, and interpreters of Scripture and the Law; spec. such a person chiefly serving as a jurist’. There follow references to an amanuensis who takes dictation, and a high-ranking or public official. The first written instance of the word meaning ‘[a] person who copies or transcribes man- uscripts, esp. one employed as a copyist in ancient or medieval times’ is given as early as 1535: George Joye, An apolgye made by George Ioye to satisfye (if it maye be) w. Tindale. 138 S. BYRNE
23. The OED notes that the word scrivener initially appears in print as a sur- name, in 1218–1222, and in 1399 as an occupation: ‘Bookbynderys no scryveners nougt payen’ W.G. Benham, Oath Book Colchester (1907). The definition given is ‘[a] person employed to copy or transcribe documents, or to write documents on behalf of someone else; a scribe, a copyist; a clerk, a secretary. Sometimes: spec. a legal clerk or copyist’. Written record of the definition ‘[a] person authorized to draw up or certify contracts, deeds, and other legal documents; a notary; a legal writing specialist’ is dated to 1431. 24. The Scriveners Company was established in London by the late four- teenth century, their members mostly acting as notaries in business and legal transactions. 25. See Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. 26. Beal, op. cit., p. 10. 27. Beal, ibid. 28. Beal, op. cit., pp. 20–28. 29. Richard A. McCabe, Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 149. 30. Huntington Library RB 62222. 31. Beal, op. cit., pp. 18–19. 32. Love and Marotti, op. cit., p. 61. 33. Love and Marotti, op. cit., p. 58. 34. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster: Or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong, but specially pur- posed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in Ientlemen and Noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge, and would, by themselues, without à Scholemaster, in short tyme, and with small paines, recouer à sufficient habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake Latin. (London: Printed by John Daye, 1570) n.p. 35. George Wither, The Schollers Purgatory Discovered in the Stationers Common-wealth (London: Imprinted by G. Wood for the Honest Stationers, 1624), p. 10. 36. Michael Hattaway, A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture vol. I (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), p. 169. 37. McCabe, op. cit., p. 63. 38. Wither, op. cit., p. 5. 39. Quoted by McCabe, op. cit., p. 64. Allan Pritchard, ‘George Wither’s Quarrel with the Stationers: An Anonymous Reply to The Schollers Purgatory’, Studies in Bibliography 16 (1963) 27–42 (37) (McCabe’s note). For Wither’s printers, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepherds Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Cultural Politics, 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 139
1612–25 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 162–187 (McCabe’s note). 40. McCabe mentions, for example, Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser, op. cit., p. 60. 41. McCabe gives the example of Henry Bynneman, who became bankrupt. Op. cit., p. 62. 42. Noted by McCabe, who quotes Ortelius: ‘authors have seldom obtained money for their books, as these are mostly presented to the printers, but they usually receive a few printed copies, and generally expect also to get something for their dedication, according to the liberality of their patron, which often or mostly (I believe) fails them’ (Quoted in Visser, Arnoud (2003)). ‘Why did Christopher Plantin Publish Emblem Books?’, in A. Adams and M. van der Weij, eds, Emblems of the Low Countries (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2003), pp. 63–68 (71) (McCabe’s note), ibid. 43. McCabe, op. cit., p. 153. 44. Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (1477); The Morale Proverbes of Christyne de Pisan (1478); Cordial (1479). 45. McCabe, op. cit., p. 153. 46. A.S.G. Edwards, ‘The Circulation of English Verse in Manuscript after the Advent of Print in England’, Studia Neophilologica 83:1 (2011) 67–77 (75). 47. McCabe notes the illusory nature of some apparent literary coteries. Op. cit., p. 200. 48. Love and Marotti op. cit., pp. 55–80 (62). For commentary on the manu- scripts, see Chris Stamatakis, Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 3–36. 49. Thomas Wyatt, De tranquilitate animi, Tho. wyatis translatyon of Plutarckes boke, of the quyete of mynde (London: Printed by Richard Pynson, 1528). 50. Edmund Spenser, Letter to Gabriel Harvey in Elizabethan Critical Essays I, ed G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), p. 88. 51. Barnabe Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes Newly Written by Barnabe Googe (1563), ed Edward Arber (London: A. Murray, 1871), p. 26. 52. Googe, op. cit., p. 24. 53. Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Patronage, Poetry, and Print’, The Yearbook of English Studies 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658 Special Number (1991), pp. 1–26 (1). 54. See, for example, Margaret Ascham’s dedication of Ascham’s Scholemaster to William Cecil; Samuel Daniel’s dedication of Poeticall Essayes to Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy (Printed by Peter Short for Simon Waterson, 1599). 140 S. BYRNE
55. ‘Speke Parott’, ‘Collyn Clout’, and ‘Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?’ were printed in Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published (London: Printed by Thomas Marsh, 1568). 56. Tamara Harvey, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas 1633–1700 (2008); rprnt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 1. 57. Margaret Hannay, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OI: Kent State University Press, 1985). 58. Harvey, op. cit., p. 1. 59. Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 122. 60. Pender, op. cit., p. 125. 61. Marotti, ‘Patronage, Poetry, and Print’, p. 3. 62. Richard Tottel, ed., Songes and Sonnettes Written by the Right Honorable Lorde Henrie Haward Late Earle of Surrey, and Other (London: Apud Ricardum Tottel. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, 1557) fol.2. 63. See Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 64. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, ed Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Mass.: 1927) quoted by Marotti, ‘Patronage, Poetry and Print’, p. 5. 65. Marotti, ‘Patronage, Poetry, and Print’, p. 5. 66. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 316. 67. McCabe, op. cit., p. 167. 68. Edward Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. ix. 69. Miller, op. cit., p. 6. 70. Miller, op. cit., p. 10. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Tradition (New York, 1952), p. 98. Miller’s note. 71. L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), pp. 315–332. 72. Knights, op. cit., p. 328. 73. Miller, op. cit., pp. 23–24. 74. George Pettie, preface, The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans George Pettie (1581) rprnt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), pp. 8–9. 75. For the importance of Castiglione’s text see Daniel Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England, Guazzo’s Civile Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (London, 1971), p. 56. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 141
76. See David Starkey, ‘The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp. 232–239. 77. Starkey, op. cit., p. 234. 78. Peter Burke argues that in The Book of the Courtier ‘sprezzatura’ is a new word given to an old idea, ‘disinvoltura’, calm self-confidence and spon- taneity. The Fortunes of the Courtier (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), p. 31. 79. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, ed. and trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) I. p. 26. 80. G.K. Hunter, Introduction, John Lyly, The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 1–35 (31). 81. Hunter, op. cit., p. 34. 82. Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poesie (1595) ed Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1967), p. 139. 83. Castiglione, op. cit., I., p. 285. 84. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doige Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 170. 85. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 58. 86. Though it was illegal to publish domestic news. Hill notes the importance of this, Intellectual Origins, p. 378. 87. Ashby 26 July 1621, in Larkin and Hughes, op. cit., p. 218. 88. See, for example, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, or the Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvetie Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subjects, in The Political Works of James I, ed Charles Howard McIllwaine (Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. 53–70 (64–65). 89. See, for example, the proclamations Wilton 23 October 1603 and Westminster 25 March 1610, in Larkin and Hughes, op. cit., p. 30, p. 110; and ‘Speech in Star-Chamber, 1616’ and ‘Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-hall’ (21 March 1609) in McIllwaine, op. cit., pp. 326–345 (332) and pp. 306–335 (310). 90. George Wither, Vox Pacifica (London: Robert Austin, 1645) K5v. 91. Thomas Carew, ‘To Ben Jonson Vpon Occasions of his Ode of Defiance Annex’d to his Play of the New Inne’ in Poems of Thomas Carew (London: Printed for I.D. by Thomas Walkley, 1640), pp. 85–87. 92. Thomas Carew, To My Worthy Friend M. D’Avenant Vpon his Excellent Play The Just Italian’, op. cit., pp. 64–65. 93. Robert Herrick, ‘His Cavalier’, Hesperides, or the Works Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq (London: Printed for John Williams and 142 S. BYRNE
Francis Eglesfield, 1648), p. 31. Subsequent page references will be to this edition. 94. For the negative as well as positive connotations of this term, see James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 1. 95. Herrick, op. cit., p. 28. 96. Herrick, op. cit., pp. 24–25. 97. Herrick, op. cit., p. 67. 98. Though not the conventional and less successful ‘To the King’ (‘Make way, make way’), op. cit., p. 278. 99. Herrick, op. cit., p. 9. 100. Herrick, op. cit., pp. 113–115. 101. Richard Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta, from Prison’, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, etc, to which is added Aramantha, A Pastoral (London: Printed by Thomas Harper, 1649), pp. 49–52. 102. Richard Lovelace, ‘The Ant’, Lucasta, Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace Esq (Printed by William Godbid for Clement Darby, 1659), pp. 13–14. Subsequent page references will be to this edition. 103. George Wither, The British Appeals (London: Printed by R.A., 1651), p. 11. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 104. David W. Petegorsky, ‘Class Forces in the English Civil War’ Science and Society VI:2 (Spring 1942), pp. 111–132 (119). 105. David Norbrook, ‘Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution 1642–1649’ in English Literary Renaissance 21:3 (September 1991), pp. 217–256 (219). 106. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography; or a Description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these Latter Times (London: Printed for M. Okes, 1645), p. 13. 107. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, or, A catalogue and discovery of many of the errours, heresies, blasphemies, and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years as also a particu- lar narration of divers stories, remarkable passages, letters, an extract of many letters, all concerning the present sects: together with some observations upon and corollories from all the fore-named premises. (London: printed for Ralph Smith, 1646) Third part, p. 108. 108. Richard Carter, The Schismatick Stigmatized (London: Printed by J. Okes for Francis Coles, 1641), p. 1. 109. See Petegorsky, op. cit., pp. 120–121. 110. See Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 37–58. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 143
111. Ralph Bathurst, ‘To the Lord Protector’, in Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1654), pp. 59–60. 112. Holberton’s examples are Hirst, ‘The Lord Protector, 1653–1658’, in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 119–148 (120); M. L. Donnelly, ‘“And Still New Stopps to Various Time Apply’d”: Marvell, Cromwell, and the Problem of Representation Midcentury’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds, On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 1992), pp. 154–168 (167). Holberton, op. cit., p. 165, Holberton’s note. 113. John Dryden, Astræa Redux. A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty Charles the Second by John Driden (London: Printed for J.M. by John Herringman, 1660), p. 6. 114. Loxley, op. cit., p. 22. 115. Loxley, op. cit., pp. 27–28. 116. Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 387. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 104. Hill’s note. 117. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in a Letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712).
Bibliography Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster: Or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed for the pri- uate brynging vp of youth in Ientlemen and Noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge, and would, by themselues, without à Scholemaster, in short tyme, and with small paines, recouer à sufficient habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake Latin. London: Printed by John Daye, 1570. Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth- Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Benedict, Barbara M., Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995. Carew, Thomas, Poems of Thomas Carew. London: Printed for I.D. by Thomas Walkley, 1640. Carter, Richard, The Schismatick Stigmatized. London: Printed by J. Okes for Francis Coles, 1641. 144 S. BYRNE
Castiglione, Baldassare, The Courtier, ed. and trans. George Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Cranmer, Thomas, ‘An Exhortation Concerning Good Order and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates’, in Certayne sermons or homilies appoynted by the kynges maiestie to be declared and redde, by all persones, vicars, or curates, euery Sundaye in their churches where they have Cure. London: Printed by Richard Grafton, 1547. Early English Books Online http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:10564:64. Crowley, Robert, Pleasure and Payne, Heaven and Hell: Remembre These Foure and All Shall Be Well. London: Grafton, 1551. Dimmock, Spenser, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Dryden, John, Astræa Redux. A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second by John Driden. London: Printed for J.M. by John Herringman, 1660. Edwards, A.S.G., ‘The Circulation of English Verse in Manuscript after the Advent of Print in England’, Studia Neophilologica 83, no. 1 (2011), 67–77. Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena, Or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of This Time, Vented and Acted in England in These Four Last Years as Also a Particular Narration of Divers Stories, Remarkable Passages, Letters, an Extract of Many Letters, All Concerning the Present Sects: Together with Some Observations Upon and Corollories from all the Fore-Named Premises. London: Printed for Ralph Smith, 1646. Forman, Valerie, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvanian Press, 2008. Fumerton, Patricia, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Googe, Barnabe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes Newly Written by Barnabe Googe (1563), ed. Edward Arber. London: A. Murray, 1871. Hannay, Margaret, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OI: Kent State University Press, 1985. Harvey, Tamara, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas 1633–1700 (2008); rprnt. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Hattaway, Michael, A New Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. I. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. Herrick, Robert, Hesperides, or the Works Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. London: Printed for John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648. Hill, Christopher, The English Revolution 1640, An Essay (1940), rev. ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1949. ———, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 145
Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c. 1550–1640. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000. Holberton, Edward, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hunter, G. K., ‘Introduction’, in John Lyly, The Humanist as Courtier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. James I, Speech in Star-Chamber, 1616 and ‘Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall’ (21 March 1609), in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIllwaine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918a, pp. 326–345 and pp. 306–335. ———, ‘The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, or the Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvetie Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subjects’, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIllwaine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918b, pp. 53–70. ———, ‘A Proclamation Against Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State’ (Whitehall, 24 December 1620), in Stuart Royal Proclamations, Vol. 1: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603–1625, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Javitch, Daniel, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England, Guazzo’s Civile Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1. London, 1971. ———, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Kitch, Aaron, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Knights, L.C., Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937. Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and Circulation’, in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, eds David Lewenstein and Jorel Mueller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 55–80. Lovelace, Richard, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, etc., to Which Is Added Aramantha, A Pastoral. London: Printed by Thomas Harper, 1649. ———, Lucasta, Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace Esq. Printed by William Godbid for Clement Darby, 1659. Loxley, James, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Marotti, Arthur F., ‘Patronage, Poetry, and Print’, The Yearbook of English Studies 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658 (1991), pp. 1–26. ———, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. 146 S. BYRNE
McCabe, Richard A., Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage and Print in the Early Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Miller, Edward Haviland, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Norbrook, David, ‘Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution 1642–1649’, English Literary Renaissance 21, no. 3 (September 1991), 217–256. Pagitt, Ephraim, Heresiography; Or a Description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these Latter Times. London: Printed for M. Okes, 1645. Pender, Patricia, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Petegorsky, David W., ‘Class Forces in the English Civil War’, Science and Society VI, no. 2 (Spring 1942), 111–132. Pettie, George, ‘Preface’, in The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo. Trans. George Pettie (1581); rprnt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doige Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Ralph, Bathurst, ‘To the Lord Protector’, in Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria. Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1654, pp. 59–60. Sheerin, Brian, Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama: Commerce, Poesy and the Profitable Imagination. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Sidney, Philip, An Apologie for Poesie (1595), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. London, 1967. ———, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Skelton, John, ‘Speke Parott’, ‘Collyn Clout’, and ‘Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?’ Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published. London: Printed by Thomas Marsh, 1568. Spenser, Edmund, Letter to Gabriel Harvey in Elizabethan Critical Essays I, ed. G. Gregory Smith. Oxford, 1904. Stamatakis, Chris, Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Starkey, David, ‘The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), 232–239. Swift, Jonathan, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in a Letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712. Tottel, Richard, ed., Songes and Sonnettes Written by the Right Honorable Lorde Henrie Haward Late Earle of Surrey, and Other. London: Apud Ricardum Tottel. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, 1557, fol.2. Van Renen, Denys, The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern Literature. Lincoln, NA and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 3 THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 147
Williams, Raymond, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Problems of Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso, 1980. Wilton 23, October 1603; Westminster 25 March 1610, in Stuart Royal Proclamations, Vol. 1: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603–1625, eds James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 30, p. 110. Wither, George, The Schollers Purgatory Discovered in the Stationers Common- wealth. London: Imprinted by G. Wood for the Honest Stationers, 1624. ———, Vox Pacifica. London: Robert Austin, 1645. ———, The British Appeals. London: Printed by R.A., 1651. ———, Britain’s Remembrancer, 2 vols. Manchester: Spenser Society (1880) I. Wyatt, Thomas, De tranquilitate animi, Tho. wyatis translatyon of Plutarckes boke, of the quyete of mynde. London: Printed by Richard Pynson, 1528. CHAPTER 4
The Eighteenth Century
Introduction This section continues the examination of the economics of poetry, in particular the patronage of plebeian1 poets, the gradual replacement of patronage by subscription and commercial publishing, poets’ references to commercial publishing, and the coexistence of concepts of literature as a profession, as a gift and vocation, and as a trade. As has been seen, writing about class in isolation is not possible, even if the focus is restricted to the poetic representation of class and the chang- ing class of those who pay for poetry. Poetic responses to class issues dur- ing the long eighteenth century are bound up with non-poetic protest, radical politics, gender issues, and war; the economics of poetry publish- ing, whilst affected by patronage and its decline, are not operating in a vacuum. As elsewhere, these issues can barely be touched on in this sec- tion, but references are given to works in which they are explored. Whereas ‘class’ has been used in a consciously anachronistic but convenient way in earlier sections of the study, in this section the term becomes current. During the later part of the long eighteenth century, the defining terms of social categorisation are no longer solely rank or estate; the middling sort becomes the middle classes, the lower orders the working classes, and ref- erences to higher or upper classes appear. As always, these terms are reduc- tive and do not allow for internal hierarchies of, for example, occupations, but the vertical metaphor remains significant.
© The Author(s) 2020 149 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_4 150 S. BYRNE
Almost as significant to this section as ‘class’ are two other related terms, ‘industry’ and ‘culture’. Raymond Williams observes that ‘indus- try’, in its meaning of manufacturing institutions rather than a human attribute, originated in the late eighteenth century,2 and argues that both ‘industry’ and ‘industrial’ signify not only technical developments’ trans- forming effect on means of production but also the effect of these changes on society, which is similarly transformed. Technical development was clearly crucial to the expansion of print in the long eighteenth century, but so too were changing modes of financing the businesses of printing, pub- lishing, and bookselling. The sense of working diligently remained cur- rent, but industrious authors, including poets, attempting to earn a living through writing faced opprobrium and were forced to enter the commer- cial world, which, in the mid to later part of the period, was directly opposed to the world of Art and imagination. Industriousness was a key tenet of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology, much lauded in improving didactic literature as the way to Earthly independence and respect and Heavenly reward. The extent to which either industry or genius, natural or original, entitled a lower-class poet to social mobility, was, during the later eighteenth century a matter of debate in both reli- gious and socio-economic works. The uneducated or self-taught genius lacked the Classical education that before and to an extent during this period distinguished the cultured person. Increased interest in the history of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English texts, dissenting academies which did not teach to a Classical cur- riculum, and emphasis on the English language as a unifying medium meant an increase in vernacular poetry, together with a proliferation of anthologies, dictionaries, guides to pronunciation, grammar books, and systems of English prosody. Much English poetry continued to use Classical conventions of, for example, pastoral, however, and Latin tags and quotations from Greek nonetheless stud many works in English to remind the reader that the author is not a monoglot, or to conceal a risqué comment from the eyes of the less learned. In Anna Letitia Barbauld’s (1743–1825) ‘The Invitation: to Miss B…’ the muses call the addressee to rural retirement, presumably to write poetry, in English,3 yet among the occupations described in the poem’s panoramic sweep are students, for whom knowledge ‘unlocks the classic page’, and the epigraph is from Virgil: ‘Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,/Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo’.4 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 151
[Here are cool springs, here soft meadows, Lycorus,/Here groves: here only time would use us up.] John Guillory notes that the middling sort who were most likely to attend the dissenting academies wanted to employ polite speech but not necessarily knowledge of Latin and Greek.
In this way, a difference from the aristocracy was preserved within the gradual process of cultural homogenization; and this difference expressed both a resentment against exclusions based upon class and religious belief and a canny recognition that the dissemination of polite speech provided a cultural basis for the dispersion of political power. Hence the programme to vernacularize the curriculum became urgent by mid-cen- tury, the subject of intense controversy. By the time Thomas Sheridan published British Education: Or the Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756), the connection between vernacular linguistic refinement and a progressive political agenda was firmly entrenched and took the pedagogical form in the dissenting academics of a revival of ‘political oratory’ or rhetoric.5
Not only use of ‘correct’ grammar but also possession of skills of rhetoric and oratory became a mark of gentility—and a claim to political engage- ment by those not born to it. As Guillory notes, however, this dissemina- tion of cultural capital ‘ceased at the border of property’.6
The English Language The increased circulation of vernacular writing during the seventeenth century produced increased scrutiny of the structure of English and its relationship to other European languages. The same kinds of anxiety about the influence of French as seen in the late Middle Ages persist, as do more general concerns about changes. The departure of Roman forces from Britain in the fifth century and the ingress of northern colonists and their languages are blamed for the alleged changeability of English in comparison with the alleged greater stability of the Romance languages (overlooking their development as dialects of Latin after the dissolution of the Roman Empire), and complaints about change become prescriptions for purifying and fixing. In the mid seventeenth century, Edmund Waller had warned poets of the ephemerality of the language and therefore their works. 152 S. BYRNE
Poets may boast (as safely-Vain) Their work shall with the world remain [....]
But who can hope his Lines should long Last in a daily changing Tongue? [....]
Poets that lasting Marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek; We write in Sand, our Language grows, And, like the Tide, our [sic word missing in 1645 edn] o’erflows.7 (ll.1–16)
In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe proposed the establish- ment of an equivalent to the Académie Français to police the English language. French provides the model which English should emulate and exceed.
The peculiar study of the academy of Paris has been to Refine and Correct their own Language, which they have done to that happy degree that we see it now spoken in all the courts of Christendom, as the Language allow’d to be most universal. […] The English Tongue is a Subject not at all less worthy [of] the Labour of such a society than the French, and capable of a much greater Perfection.
[…] Therefore, the work of that society should be: to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English Tongue, and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc’d; and all those Innovations in Speech, if I may call them such, which some Dogmatic Writers have the Confidence to foster upon their Native Language, as if their Authority were sufficient to make their own Fancy legitimate.
This will establish English as ‘the Noblest and most Comprehensive of all the Vulgar Languages in the World’.8
Defoe proposes that the society should be composed of ‘gentlemen’, including 12 members of the nobility, who would wield authority (p. 235). 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 153
The society would provide lectures not only on the origin and forms of English, but also
[r]eflections upon Irregular Usages, and Corrections of Erroneous Customs in Words; and, in short, everything that wou’d appear necessary to the bringing our English Tongue to a due Perfection, and our Gentlemen to a Capacity of Writing like themselves. (p. 237)
Jonathan Swift’s proposal, a few years later, though it refers to the influ- ence of ‘cant’ words, does not assert the inferiority of lower-class speech, but ascribes the corruption of the language to the upper classes, and poets. A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language states as fact that ‘our’ language
is extremely imperfect […] its daily Improvements are by no means in pro- portion to its daily Corruptions; that the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and that in many instances, it offends against every part of Grammar.9
The answer is to ‘refine’ the language and ‘fix it for ever’. The corruption of the language has come from James I’s poor taste, the licentiousness of Charles I, and the ‘Enthusiastick’ register of the ‘Fanatick Times’ of the recent past (pp. 18–19). ‘The Court, which used to be the Standard of Propriety and Correctness of Speech, was then, and, I think, hath ever since continued the worst School in England for that Accomplishment’ (p. 19). The young nobility must be educated in literature in order to absorb some ‘Patterns of Politeness’, but by literature from at least 50 years before, since that is not full of ‘affected phrases and new conceited Words’. The sound of the language is better trusted to women than to ‘illiterate Court Fops, half-witted Poets, and University Boys’ because women dis- card consonants as men discard vowels (p. 28). Defoe also advocated the eradication of the effect on the language of writers, in his case, ‘to silence the impudence and impertinence of young authors whose ambition is to be known, though it be by their folly’. For Swift, however, poets’ contribution to ‘the spoiling of the English Tongue’ is in its sound. Since the time of the Restoration, they have had the ‘barbarous custom’ of abbreviating words, even though they were aware that the language is ‘overstocked with Monosyllables’ (p. 20). They have joined consonants without intervening vowels to make sounds that only ‘a Northern Ear’ 154 S. BYRNE could bear. In his exhortation to the Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Swift makes this enterprise parallel to saving the country from foreign wars and domestic faction, and humorously adds to his idea of fixing the language forever, ‘at least till we are invaded and made a Conquest by some other State’, suggesting a relationship between language, identity, and national- ism (p. 41). Swift and Defoe’s projects of authoritatively fixing the language accord with that of Addison, one of whose priorities was to cleanse the language of French words. Addison uses the metaphor of ‘Foreign Coin’, marking the sense in which language was becoming seen as a commodity, an anal- ogy still current at the present. In a Spectator article, Addison juxtaposes his references to excluding French words from the English language with language that might be used of eradicating the French. He asserts that there should be superintendents of language as there are of laws, liberties and commerce:
to hinder any Words of a Foreign Coin from passing among us; and in par- ticular to prohibit any French Phrases from becoming Current in this Kingdom, when those of our own Stamp are altogether as valuable. The present War has so Adulterated our Tongue with strange Words, that it would be impossible for one of our Great-Grandfathers to know what his Posterity have been doing, were he to read their Exploits in a Modern News Paper. Our Warriors are very Industrious in Propagating the French Language, at the same time that they are so gloriously successful in beating down their Power. Our Soldiers are Men of strong Heads for Action, and perform such Feats as they are not able to express. They want Words in their own Tongue to tell us what it is they Atchieve, and therefore send us over Accounts of their Performances in a Jargon of Phrases, which they learn among their Conquered Enemies.10
This ‘trope of power’, as Lynda Mugglestone refers to it, has a history of precedent, for example, in Edward Phillips’s 1658 New World of Words reference to ‘armies of foreign words’ and Dryden’s use of the register of enemy occupation: ‘[i]f too many Foreign Words are pour’d in upon us, it looks as if they were design’d not to assist the Natives, but to Conquer them’.11 Finally abandoning his own project of fixing the language, in the Preface to his Dictionary, Dr Johnson first uses the metaphor of embalm- ing, then the register of warfare: 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 155
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that prom- ises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexi- cographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. The academies that have been established to ‘guard the avenues’ of lan- guage, and ‘repulse intruders’ have shown ‘vigilance’ but their activity has been in vain.12
Fixing the written language on the model of Standard English obviously has advantages, but as English spelling is equated to Received Pronunciation (RP), and dialects other than Standard English are consid- ered inappropriate for the products of high culture, so there are obvious disadvantages for those speakers of other dialects in other pronunciations who want to write in their own voice. Reactions of different kinds to this exclusion can be seen in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in all genres, but most especially in post–Second World War twentieth-century poetry, which is discussed in a subsequent chapter. Alongside the emphasis on the value of the vernacular during the eigh- teenth century are attempts to align English with Classical languages, which in many ways remain the prestigious forms. The grammar of English is wrenched towards that of Latin which it does not resemble, and English prosody takes a Classical model. The distinguishing feature of poetry, the poetic line, is not fixed and immutable. Antony Easthope points out that ‘just as poetry is always a specific poetic discourse, so line organization always takes a specific historical form, and so is ideological’ and ‘a major contribution to the cohesion of the discourse’,13 an important statement given that ‘metre generally inscribes precedence of the signifier into the very basis of poetry’, and ‘[i]f the material basis of poetry is recognized in metre, in the “paral- lelism of the signifier” the ensuing question must be how different metres are historically specific’.14 The line of iambic pentameter is characteristic of 156 S. BYRNE traditional English accentual-syllabic metre because it is said to arise natu- rally from spoken English language.
Despite significant historical developments in practice notably Augustan correctness in the couplet followed by Romantic relaxation—there is a solid institutional continuity of the pentameter in England from the Renaissance to at least 1900. Like linear perspective in graphic art and Western harmony in music, the pentameter may be an epochal form, one co-terminous with bourgeois culture from the Renaissance till now.15
Easthope’s focus on iambic pentameter does not ignore the existence of other feet. It refers to the convention that English poetic lines have a restricted number of syllables, the foot requires a set number of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the two-syllable foot is ubiquitous. Easthope finds no reason to doubt Martin Halpern’s statement that ‘of the four so- called “syllable-stress” metres in English—iambic, trochaic, anapaestic and dactylic—only the iambic has developed in a direction radically different from the native accentual tradition’.16 He finds that the other three, as characteristically used in English poetry, are ‘simply variants of the strong- stress mode’. Summarising the development of iambic pentameter from Chaucer through its rebirth in the sixteenth century, Easthope shows that the line is not ‘natural’ but a cultural phenomenon, a discursive form.17 Modern English is a determinant for iambic pentameter but it is not the only deter- minant. The four-stressed line ‘exploits English more obviously and read- ily than pentameter. Not concerned with unstressed syllables, it accommodates itself easily to the way isochrony demotes syllables between stresses, whilst pentameter insists on them, being concerned with the number of syllables in a line’.18 This identification is problematic.
Pentameter is widely read merely as a signifier denoting the signified ‘this discourse is poetry’, its avowed function being no more than the need to determine line boundaries. But this sign (‘pentameter means poetry’) elides (and would conceal) two equations: (a) poetry consists of lines (the material nature of poetry); (b) pentameter is one historically determined form of line organization (and there are others). The metre can be seen not as a neutral form of poetic necessity but a specific historical form producing certain meanings and acting to exclude others.19 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 157
The defining feature of pentameter, counterpoint, aligns it with quantita- tive Greek and Latin metre which have binary syllables arranged in feet, and the very terms used for English prosody use a Classical register. As the non-metric intonation approximates to the abstract pattern, the native language is brought into relation with the classical model. This, for Easthope, means that the ‘national tongue can dress itself in the clothes of antiquity’.
In an unbroken continuity from the Renaissance to 1900 and beyond, a poem within the metrical tradition identifies itself (in Puttenham’s words) with polish and reformed manners as against poetry in another metre which can be characterized as rude, homely, and in the modern sense, vulgar.20
Poetry and Bookselling in the Mid to Late Eighteenth Century Financing of bookselling changed dramatically in the period. As well as the development of the insurance market, James Raven cites new sources of capital, readier circulation and more flexible use of assets, and inflows of capital from increased mercantile activity, which backed the expanding London money market, enabling credit to go further and extending credit chains.21 New money and the ‘ready discounting of bills of exchange’ enabled expansion of the book trade, and insurance limited risk to stock, but they also put the trade at greater risk from external pressures, and Raven notes that not everyone in the trade prospered. One kind of paper trade, bookselling, became part of another, ‘paper credit’, the circulation of non-material forms of property. Greatly involved in both of these were emergent professional authors, those who lived wholly or mainly on the profit of their writing, negotiated with booksellers, and demanded a rea- sonable share in the profits from their works. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) both invested in speculations such as the South Sea Company22 and deplored the transactions of the market,23 he declared himself unfettered by patrons or pensions, and presented himself as above vulgar commercial- ism, yet negotiated advantageous deals with booksellers and fiercely pro- tected his copyright. This professionalism, whilst providing a living and social mobility for some, did not entail a democratisation of authorship. The professional author could take advantage of the increase of theatre- going by writing plays; of the burgeoning literacy and increasing circula- tion of journals by writing articles; of the increasing demand for fiction by 158 S. BYRNE writing novels. Few playwrights, however, made a fortune, and the close association between periodicals, coffee houses, and political factions meant that the writer of articles might become the puppet of whichever Tory or Whig group was presently hiring. The lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 169524 lifted some restrictions on printing. The inexpensive monthly and weekly journals that proliferated during the later long eighteenth century and into the nineteenth catered for wider ranges of readers and readerly tastes, mixing journalism and fiction. Poems could be published in jour- nals as well as in pamphlets and books, but the poet who tried to earn a living was subject to the same prejudice as the journalist and fiction-writer, the opprobrium of the hack. James Ralph describes this in his The Case of Authors By Profession or Trade Stated, With Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public, No Matter by Whom.
Thus a Man may plead for Money, prescribe or quack for Money, preach and pray for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money, do anything within the Law for Money, provided the Expedient answers, without any the least imputation. But if he writes like one inspired from Heaven, and writes for Money, the Man of Touch in the Right of Midas, his great Ancestor, enters his Caveat against him as a Man of Taste; declares the two Provinces to be incompati- ble; that he who aims at Praise ought to be starved; and that there ought to be so much draw-back upon Character for every Acquisition in Coin.25
The work demands both respect and profit for the professional author, pointing out that the bookseller who sells the work of noble amateurs who waive the profit do not give away the booksgratis , but would say that the ‘compliment’ had been paid to them, not to the public, and that ‘he had allowed in the Difference of Paper and Print, an equivalence for the Pittance usually given to the Author’.26 Ralph also argues that the habitual as opposed to holiday or ‘Voluntier’ writer gains skill through continual practice.27 For a professional writing for ‘a Faction in the name of the Community’, the problem is that the Community, though aware that the press is needed, and willing to demand the liberty of the press, will not take it out of the hands of faction. He advocates a warrant being made to ensure ‘a fair, full and effectual Audit’ of publication. Writing for booksell- ers, however, ‘is, more or less a Grievance, according as the Bargain can be driven, but it is always a Grievance, let the Bargain be driven how it will’ because the bookseller must maximise profit and cater to the market, so 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 159 the author will be forced to write the works that bookseller believes will sell. The writer is like a slave, therefore.
Both have their Tasks assigned them alike: Both must drudge and starve, and neither can hope for Deliverance. The Compiler must compile; the Composer must compose on, sick or well; in Spirit or out; whether furnish’d with Matter or not; till, by the joint Pressure of Labour, Penury, and Sorrow, he has worn out his Parts, his Constitution, and all the little Stock of Reputation he had acquir’d among the Trade; Who were All perhaps, that ever heard of his Name.28
That authors have become slaves to booksellers is a common trope in eighteenth-century writing. It is voiced humorously in Peregrine Pickle in 1751 and declaimed by Charles Churchill (1732–1764) 12 years later. Smollett’s ‘college of authors’ describe the trade as taking ‘all opportuni- ties to oppress and enslave their authors; not only by limiting men of genius to the wages of a journeyman taylor […] but also in taking such advantage of their necessities, as were inconsistent with justice and human- ity’.29 Churchill’s The Author asks:
Ah! What are Poets now? as slavish those Who deal in Verse as those who deal in Prose. Is there an Author, search the Kingdom round, In whom true worth, and real Spirit’s found? The Slaves of Booksellers, or (doom’d by Fate To baser chains), vile pensioners of State30
Ralph concludes that a writer is laughed at if he is poor, but branded as mercenary if ‘he endeavours to turn his Wit to Profit’. Even were he to disregard this, without better laws of copyright and royalties, he is robbed.
His Property may be worth taking though not worth defending; Magazines, Chronicles &c. may retale him—Coffee-houses subscribe for him—Circulating Libraries subsist by lending him.—So that he may be read everywhere, rewarded nowhere31
In 1709, Pope writes to William Wycherley that those who have made an appearance as a poet may give up ‘pretension to all the rich and thriving arts’; those who pay court to ‘those mistresses without portions, the Muses are never likely to set up for Fortunes’.32 Perhaps disingenuously, 160 S. BYRNE he insists that he is indifferent, but referring to the bookseller Jacob Tonson, he writes that ‘Jacob creates poets as Kings sometimes do knights, not for their honour but for their mony. Certainly he ought to be esteem’d a worker of miracles, who is grown rich by poetry.’ The letter ends on an epigram:
What Authors lose, their booksellers have won, So Pimps grown rich while Gallants are undone.
The comparison between pimps and booksellers on the basis of both earn- ing from others’ labour is understandable. The comparison between gal- lants, the customers who pay more to the middleman than they would to the deliverer of the service, the sex worker, and authors, the sellers, is odd. Pope could be referring to works published at the author’s expense, so that they pay the printer, who becomes a middleman, but the term ‘gal- lant’ has overtones of a leisured man about town, perhaps a courtier, and retains some social cachet, though increasingly used mockingly at the time. Pope and his contemporaries are concerned with social status and the financial inequities of the bookselling trade, but poets in the later part of the long eighteenth century, discussed later, represent poetry itself as the antithesis of commerce, and whilst representing the plight of the lower classes and even advocating revolution, simultaneously mistrust the public from whom they set themselves apart.
Class and Two Cultures Raymond Williams argues that the change in meaning of the word ‘cul- ture’ from ‘tending to natural growth’, through ‘a general state or habit of mind’, the ‘general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole’, and ‘the general body of the arts’, to ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’ enabled and furthered also the distinction between cultures of different classes.33 Thus a distinction arises between the poetry of lower-class culture and that of upper-class culture, and a concomitant distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high’ art. If the lower classes recite it, it can’t be good, therefore it can’t be canonical High Art; if it accords with the taste of the upper classes, and preferably is composed by an author endorsed by them and aspiring to their values, it must be High Art. This is to put a more complex situation and more complex attitudes simplistically. The margins have a habit of becoming central, and 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 161 eighteenth-century antiquarianism and interest in folk art generated cul- tural value for older ballads and other works. Nonetheless, it is possible to see in writing about poetry and culture of this period essentialist dis- tinctions which attribute finer feelings, greater perception, and more intense emotional responses to upper-class characters and their creators, and the beginning of the association between regional accent and social class. For E.P. Thompson, whilst the distance in wealth and prestige between ranks in eighteenth-century England was narrower than that between the French aristocracy and peasantry, the English ‘cultural framework’ of the time took as axiomatic ‘an essential qualitative difference between the validity of educated experience—polite culture—and the culture of the poor’.34 Therefore, an individual’s culture as much as their social prestige ‘was graded according to the hierarchy of rank’. That gradation, though theoretically including the middling sort and professional and gentry class, was often in practice applied as though there were a simpler binary distinc- tion between gentle and not gentle, patrician and plebeian, or polite and vulgar. Thompson quotes Goethe’s Werther: ‘Persons of rank tend to keep their cold distance from the common man, as if they fear to lose some- thing by such intimacy’, arguing that this reminds us not only of the social space between ‘gentry and people’ in 1774 but also of ‘the stirring self- consciousness about this space’ in Rousseau’s Europe at the time.35 Though there was much interest in folk customs and popular culture, this was mostly viewed as though by an anthropologist or antiquary. In poems which represent or suggest interaction between the classes, the relation- ships tend to be those of landowner and agricultural worker, philanthro- pist and client. The answer to rural poverty is good lordship—benevolent, charitable patronage. In The Seasons,36 for example, James Thomson (1740–1748) describes a flood that washes away a husbandman’s living, and recommends the landowner to be ‘mindful’
of the rough laborious hand That sinks you soft in elegance, and ease; Be mindful of those limbs in russet clad, Whose toil to yours is warmth, and graceful pride; And O, be mindful of that sparing board, Which covers your’s with luxury profuse, Makes your glass sparkle, and senses rejoice! (‘Autumn’, ll.344–359) 162 S. BYRNE
The mindfulness should result in the landowner’s not demanding the hus- bandman’s lost goods that
the deep rains, And all-involving winds have swept away. (‘Autumn’, ll.356–361)
Thomson represents Britain as fertile and productive, enriched by both commerce and farming
Thy country teems with wealth; And PROPERTY assures it to the swain, Pleas’d and unwear’d, in his certain toil. (‘Summer’, ll.546–547)
This is the epitome of the happy worker:
Trade and Joy in every busy street, Mingling are heard: every DRUDGERY himself, As at the car he sweats, or dusty hews The palace-stone looks gay. (ll.550–553)
The only threat to the rural workers is nature, smilingly benign through most of the poem but deadly in the summer storm which kills an unnamed shepherd (‘Summer’, ll.869–878) and Amelia, the beloved of Celadon (ll.896–944). ‘Autumn’ gives a historical pageant in which the bounty of personified nature and industry unite to provide for ancient humankind, seemingly without much suffering or inequality—all are in wool or silk.
INDUSTRY approach’d, And rous’d him from his miserable sloth; His faculties unfolded; pointed out Where lavish NATURE the directing hand of ART demanded. (‘Autumn’, ll.77–81)
Industry teaches humankind to work wood and stone, and replaces ‘blood- polluted fur’, wrapping us in ‘woolly vestment warm’, or making us ‘bright in glossy silk, and flowing lawn (‘Autumn’, ll.87–91).
Then humankind comes together to make laws and justice, chaining oppression and ensuring that the ‘toiling millions’ do not 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 163
resign their weal And all the honey of their search, to such As for themselves alone themselves have rais’d. (‘Autumn’, ll.109–112)
The poems present Britain united in peace and war in the enterprise of making the country indomitable and prosperous, yet the refer- ence to the workers’ honey becomes ironic in ‘Autumn”s lament over the hive which people have robbed and destroyed, since the poem seems more sympathetic to exploited bees than to exploited human workers (ll.1073–1101).
‘Winter’ does describe inequality, tasking the ‘gay, licentious proud’ (l.396) with failing to be mindful of the many who suffer and bleed
‘By shameful variance betwixt man and man.’ (l .404)
The answer is to think of such people, which would produce a collective philanthropy, since the hand of charity dictates a collective empathy (social tears and sighs) (ll.429–32). The poem moves from the suggestion that the deprivations it lists are in Britain, to the horrors of foreign lands, and when the poem returns to British villagers, it is to a roaring fire, goblin stories, comfort, and ‘rustic mirth’ (l.620). Rural culture is represented as unsophisticated but untroubled.
The simple joke that takes the shepherd’s heart, Easily pleas’d; the long, loud laugh sincere […] The leap, the slap, the haul; and, shook to notes Of native music, the respondent dance. Thus jocund fleets with them the winter night. (ll.621–627)
Thompson argues that though the radical politics of the later eighteenth century make notions of egalité less unthinkable, the culture of the labour- ing classes continues to be perceived as subordinate.37 That subordination is clearly marked in pastoral poetry, which depicts the agricultural labourer as part of a prospect, homogenised and commodified. Whilst able to sym- pathise with the poor, eighteenth-century pastoral rarely offers solutions to their problems. It provides the dual functions of enabling the poet to depict a persona in the role of privileged contemplative solitary with time 164 S. BYRNE on their hands, and of enabling the reader to participate in the elevated position from which the comfortingly unchanging prospect is viewed. Guillory notes that in the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), Thomas Gray (1716–1771) represents through the anachronistic pastoral a society comprised only of aristocracy and commons. ‘Gray inserts himself into the Elegy as a figure just like the idle aristocrat in pastoral disguise, a surprisingly belated performance of what Empson calls the “trick” of Renaissance pastoral.’38 That Gray was not an aristocrat but the son of a scrivener illustrates John Barrell’s point that ‘the boundary between gen- tleman and author is effaced when “men of letters” arrogate to the them- selves the discourse of gentility’.39 Gray’s pseudo-aristocratic persona, however, conflicts with the poet’s Whig stance on the dissemination of cultural capital through education. His fragment ‘The Alliance of Education and Government’ does not break free from pastoral imagery and metaphor to make any statements about how knowledge could be disseminated and how this would improve British society. Guillory provides this example to underline the relationship between polite letters and political economy and to ‘make intelligible the contradiction between the Elegy’s pathetic depic- tion of deprivation and the aloofness of the solitary, whom we cannot imagine condescending to teach the peasantry to read’.40
The Plebeian Poet of Genius Thompson locates the last manifestation of the Holy Peasant archetype in English literature in Langland’s and Chaucer’s ploughmen, and its hover- ing echo in Shakespeare, but argues that this myth is largely absent from British culture.41 He attributes this firstly to the smaller distance between the British upper classes and the labouring poor than between those groups during the French ancien régime or in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and, secondly, to the ‘profound revaluation of social attitudes entailed in Puritanism’, since a holy peasantry requires a Holy Church, whereas Protestant England ‘required, not obedient children, but a sober and industrious poor, informed by an inner discipline’. This study has argued that the peasantry is neither sacrosanct nor homogeneous in Langland’s, Chaucer’s, or Shakespeare’s works. Langland’s Plowman demands but doesn’t always get industry of his workers and Lollard-influenced works such as Pierce the Plowman’s Crede challenge unthinking obedience to church teaching and encourage greater dependence on conscience and grace. Middle English and later texts of popular and oral culture represent 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 165 peasants as both rogues (Mak the Sheep Stealer) and victims, usually vic- tims of oppression by high-ranking individuals and groups, rescued by heroes who are or become members of the higher ranks, such as Robin Hood. In neither case are they holy. During the long eighteenth century, Sensibility tends to cast the lower- class poet, particularly the short-lived rural lower-class poet, in something close to this role. Mystically connected to the land, gifted but uneducated, visionary, at times unvalued; not closer to God as Thompson’s Holy Peasants are, but closer to Nature and the animating spirit of things than those bound up in the world of industry, the type of these is John Clare (1793–1864), the ‘Northamptonshire peasant poet’, who has even a touch of holy madness. Octavius Gilchrist introduces Clare to the literary world in the title of his article as ‘an Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, a term repeated in the piece, together with ‘rustic’, and the emphasis of the piece is Clare’s lack of sophistication, deference, and humility.42 He is ‘shy, and reserved’ and ‘disarrayed’; he is unlikely to have trodden on a fine carpet, ‘assuredly’ had not tasted fine wine before. A few decades earlier, Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) was also mythicised. Though he was of urban origin and the (posthumous) son of a teacher, Chatterton’s poverty and early death and the anti-modern medievalism of the ‘Rowley’ poems established his place as ‘the marvellous Boy/The sleepless Soul that per- ished in its pride’43 in the elegies, memorials, and dedications by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and others. Chatteron remains an icon and an influence in the twentieth century, in, for example, Barry MacSweeney’s ‘Wolf Tongue’, subtitled ‘a Chatterton ode’.44 Whilst the status of Robert Burns (1759–1796) in the eighteenth- century imaginary was not holy, it was that of a Gifted peasant. ‘Resolution and Independence’ also speaks ‘Of Him who walked in glory and in joy/ Following his plough, along the mountain-side’. That Burns’s most fre- quent soubriquet was ‘The Ploughman Poet’, though he was not a ploughman but the son of a tenant farmer who took over from his father, and who spent more of his adult life as editor and excise officer than in farming, indicates the strength of the legend. (Burns himself may have contributed to this, however; he is quoted as referring to himself being ‘bred at a plough-tail’, and refers to himself as having been a plough- boy.45)46 Henry Mackenzie’s article in The Lounger fed the myth, referring to the ‘divinity of genius’47 and asserting that readers of the poems of ‘our rustic bard’ would ‘perceive with what uncommon penetration and sagac- ity this Heaven-taught ploughman, from his humble and unlettered sta- 166 S. BYRNE tion, has looked upon men and manners’.48 Nigel Leask notes that Mackenzie was ‘artfully’ echoing James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1769–1774): ‘let thy heaven-taught soul to heaven aspire,/ To fancy, freedom, har- mony, resign’d;/ Ambition’s grovelling crew for ever left behind’.49 James Macaulay’s ‘Rhyming Epistle to Mr R—B—, Ayrshire’ challenges the pop- ular image:
But still for a’ the blast that’s made, I doubt you are some sleekit blade. That never handled shool or spde, Or yet the pleugh [....]
For by the scraps o’ French an’ Latin, That’s flung athort your buik fu’ thick in, It’s easy seen you’ve aft been flitting Frae school to school50
The rhetoric of sentiment might want the rustic poet to be unlettered and saintly, but with the reverence went anxiety about its effect. Even the admiring Mackenzie regrets some of Burns’s lines, but allows that Burns had no more refined friend or companion who was able to correct him. ‘When we reflect on his rank in life, the habits to which he must have been subject, and the society in which he must have mixed, we may regret per- haps more than wonder, that delicacy should be so often offended in perusing a volume in which there is so much to please us.’51 The patronis- ing and stereotyping of Burns’s ‘peasant’ background is prevalent in many biographies and reviews,52 but it is different in kind from the remarks directed at less Romantic figures for whom no claims to Bardic or natural genius status are made. An early unsigned notice in the Edinburgh Magazine anticipates cavils at Burns’s lack of education and knowledge of Classical literature, and assumes that those who ‘view him with the severity of lettered criticism, and judge him by the fastidious rules of art, will dis- cover that he has not the doric simplicity of Ramsay, nor the brilliant imag- ination of Ferguson’ but that those ‘who admire the exertions of untutored fancy, and are blind to many faults for the sake of numberless beauties’ will be gratified.53 Burns is ‘a striking example of native genius bursting through the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life’. It continues by regretting that a man said to be a ‘common ploughman’ has 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 167 not been placed by fate in ‘a more favoured situation’. The notice finds applicable to Burns Horace’s description of Ofellus in Satires II.ii.3: ‘Rusticus abnormis sapiens, crassaque Minerva’ (A peasant, a philosopher unschooled and of rough mother-wit.)54 The treatment of these poets in Robert Southey’s (1774–1843) Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets, as uninformed, unspoiled natural or primitive geniuses, categorises them as childlike, unworldly, and amateur. Whilst able to benefit from judicious encouragement, they are not full participants in high culture.55 Southey’s justification for his Lives is that the age of Reason had begun, ‘and we were advancing with quick step in the March of Intellect’, so the old servant Mr Jones, who had sent Southey his poems, ‘would in all likelihood be the last versifyer of his class’.56 Southey traces the exclusion and reinclusion of the lower-class person from poetry through the history of the English language, or, rather, as Southey sees it, languages.
The distinction between the language of high and low life could not be broadly marked, till our language was fully formed, in the Elizabethan age: then the mother tongue of the lower classes ceased to be the language of composition; that of the peasantry was antiquated, that of the inferior citi- zens had become vulgar.57
The success of the Waterman Poet, Taylor, is attributed to ‘all persons on the river’ being allowed licence for wit ‘which would not have been toler- ated elsewhere’, and because his occupation brought him into contact with people of a superior rank whose conversation would have provided an education in concomitant superior language.58 Stephen Duck’s success is attributed in part to his having attentively read not only Addison but great works of the past such as Paradise Lost, with a dictionary. Southey praises Duck for realising that he was not capable of reproducing Milton’s lan- guage: ‘he never again attempted what he had good sense enough to per- ceive he was incapable of performing as it ought to be done’.59 This is in keeping with the early eighteenth-century distinction between natural and original genius as explained by Steve Van-Hagen: natural genius denoting a person capable of producing poetry by imitation of great works on which they had received no formal teaching; the more radical concept of original genius denoting the ability to produce poetry without prior knowledge of other works.60 168 S. BYRNE
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates deflates the pride of the poet by saying that his speaking well on Homer is not art but a divine power, a power that moves things like a magnet. The Muse is said to inspire in this manner, inspira- tion spreading from person to person in a chain. So ‘all the good epic poets utter all those fine poems not from art, but as inspired and pos- sessed, and the good lyric poets likewise’. In the same way as Corybantian worshippers don’t dance ‘with their senses’, so lyric poets don’t compose poetry ‘in their senses’, but possessed, frantic. A poet, then, is ‘a light and winged and sacred thing, and is unable ever to indite until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him: every man, whilst he retains possession of that, is powerless to indite a verse or chant an oracle’.61 Speaking of the instinct to imitate, Aristotle, in the Poetics, states that those ‘starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry’.62 Longinus’s On the Sublime gives weight to genius, but argues that genius needs art.
The first question which presents itself for solution is whether there is any art which can teach sublimity or loftiness in writing. For some hold generally that there is mere delusion in attempting to reduce such subjects to technical rules. ‘The Sublime’, they tell us, ‘is born in a man, and not to be acquired by instruction; genius is the only master who can teach it: ‘Poeta nascitur, non fit.’63
Nature cannot be left to itself, and nor can the ‘great passions’, which are like a ship sailing randomly without ballast. Both genius and art are needed.64 The influence of the Classical writers may have operated indi- rectly, through, for example, Sir Philip Sidney, who states that a poet ‘no industrie can make if his owne Genius bee not carried vnto it, and there- fore is it an old proverb, “Orator fit; poeta nascurit.”’ Again, however, this aphorism is modified: ‘Yet confesse I always, that as the fertilest grounde must be manured, so must the highest flying wit haue a Dedalus to guide him.’ Poetry requires: ‘Arte, Imitation and Exercise’.65 In 1711, Addison writes of those few ‘great Geniuses’ who ‘draw the admiration of all the world’, and ‘stand up as the prodigies of mankind’, who by ‘the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning’ produced works that were ‘the delight of their own times and the wonder of posterity’.66 The ‘nobly wild and extravagant’ in the 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 169 works of these ‘great natural geniuses’ is more pleasing than refinement and polish. He warns, however, that though geniuses who were never ‘disciplined and broken by rules of art’ abounded among the ancients, it would be ridiculous for ‘men of sober and moderate fancy’ to imitate them. Later in the century, as Romanticism privileges inspiration, the original genius is prized above the poet who learns from earlier models. In 1749, Edward Young (1683–1765) can assert that learning is not only unnecessary for genius but undesirable. Making an analogy between riches and virtue—the former most wanted where there is least of the latter—and leaning and genius, he states that ‘[a]s Virtue without much Riches can give Happiness, so Genius without much Learning can give Renown Young. […] An Original [genius] may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made’.67 From this belief in natural genius it does not follow that genius should be looked for in every countryman, nor especially in every artisan. Young’s first ‘Epistle to Mr Pope’ deplores the abandoning of crafts for literature.
His Hammer This, and That his Trowel quits, And wanting Sense for Tradesmen, serve for Wits: By thriving men subsists each other Trade; Of ev’ry broken Craft a Writer’s made68
The labouring poet is not, however, singled out for censure; the poem complains of the proliferation of writers from all classes, ‘Peers, Porters, [or] Taylors’. This is of a piece with other works and the periodicals and letters of the early and mid-century, which are full of comments about the ubiquity of amateur poets who lack natural genius.69 The Conjectures continues:
Genius is a master work-man, Learning is but an instrument; and an instru- ment tho’ most valuable, yet not always indispensable. […] Have not some, tho’ not famed for Erudition, so written, as almost to persuade us, that they shone brighter, and soared higher, for escaping the boasted aid of that proud Ally? Nor is it strange, for what, for the most part, do we mean by Genius, but the Power of accomplishing great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end? […] Genius is ever supposed to partake of something Divine.70 170 S. BYRNE
This is close to the theory attributed by Horace to Democritus and pre- sented ironically in the Ars Poetica.
ingenium misera quia fortunatius arte credit et excludit sanos Helicone poetas Democritus, bona pars non unguis ponere curat, non barbam, secreta petit loca, balnea uitat. (ll.295–298)
[Because Democritus believes that native talent is a greater boon than wretched art, and shuts out from Helicon poets in their sober senses, a goodly number take no pains to pare their nails or to shave their beards; they haunt lonely places and shun the baths.]71
For William Duff, imagination is the ‘predominant ingredient in the com- position of poetic Genius’. His ‘young Bard’ (not a child but a more mature youth) is likely to exercise the imagination on the beauties of nature, since ‘one who is born with a Genius for Poetry, will discover a peculiar relish and love for it in his earliest years’,72 citing as examples, Tasso, Milton, and Pope.
We shall only add, that the performances of a youthful Poet, possessed of true Genius, will always abound with that luxuriance of imagination, and with that vivacity and spirit which are suitable to his years; but at the same time they will generally be destitute of that chastity and masculine vigour of expression, as well as justness and propriety of sentiment, which are only compatible with maturer age.73
The plebeian poets of the Augustan school do not experience poetic furor and are not promoted as the unkempt, wild prophetic singer in the style of Blake’s Ancient Bard. The virtues with which they are credited—thrift, industry, and humility—and which are essential to their claim to good character and their assumed worthiness of promotion, are not commensu- rate with divine madness. Rather, they fit the category of natural geniuses who have learned by imitating the great poets of the past and great prose writers of the present, such as Addison. Hannah More (1745–1843), patron of one of the poets discussed in this chapter, in ‘Sensibility, A Poetical Epistle’74 distinguishes between wit and poetic talent, and associates imagination, the vital element of poetic genius, with sensibility. 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 171
Yet what is wit, and what the Poet’s art? Can genius shield the vulnerable heart? Ah no! Where bright imagination reigns, The fine wrought spirit feels acuter pains. (ll.65–68)
As late as 1800, the Duke of Grafton writes to express his gratitude to Capel Lofft for recommending to him Robert Bloomfield: ‘the acquain- tance of a real untaught genius, starting from our neighbourhood; which together with the account you give of his moral character, makes me very desirous of being of service to him’.75 Though just how back-breaking, penurious, and dangerous agricultural labour could be was readily evident, the myth of pastoral Arcadia held a powerful place in the mid-eighteenth-century imaginary. This myth repre- sents an Edenic countryside as a location in which inspiration can be received without the interference of distractions, sophistries, and corrup- tion of modern city life. The English Home Counties contain the grove of the Muses and natural genius, naturally attracted to natural countryside, is nourished by and effuses on its beauties.
Genius naturally shoots forth in the simplicity and tranquillity of unculti- vated life. The undisturbed peace, and the innocent rural pleasures of this primeval state, are, if we may so express it, congenial to its nature. […] Happily exempt from that tormenting ambition, and those vexatious desires, which trouble the current of modern life, he wanders with a serene, con- tented heart, through walks and groves consecrated to the Muses.76
Thus the prefaces to the work of plebeian poets by their patrons tend to emphasise the poets’ lack of formal education, their untaught talent, the inspiration they take from nature as well as from Shakespeare and Milton, their virtues, and their affecting life stories. Perceived differences in quality and kind between cultures of the upper and lower social ranks can be seen as infantilising and disenfranchising patronised poets such as Robert Dodsley (1704–1764), Stephen Duck (1705–1756), and Ann Yearsley (1753–1806). Not all plebeian poets achieved the success or the mythical status of Chatterton or Burns, but many have in common patrons who presented and promoted them within a very specific and limiting conception of their capabilities, status, and rights. Provided that he or she is a rare occurrence, suitably grateful, and suitably humble, this protégé threatens no social hierarchy and their dis- 172 S. BYRNE covery and support exhibits the discernment and generosity of the patron. Not all plebeian poets accepted the status of fawning household pet, as Betty Rizzo refers to them.77 Van-Hagen shows that, for example, James Woodhouse, for a time patronised by Elizabeth and Edward Montague and promoted as a natural genius, not only broke with his patrons and produced politically and theologically radical works, but also emphasised the need for continually learning and improvement in literary art, and rejected the need to imitate neoclassical models.78 The lives of Duck, Yearsley, and Dodsley spanned more than a century, a period during which the relationship between patron and writer changed, and when patronage as a way of earning money from poetry was largely succeeded by other means. Publishing by subscription, publishing at the author’s risk, and commercial publishing on the basis of advance and roy- alties provided a living for very few poets, but nonetheless, the increased spending power and literacy of the middle classes and concomitant sales of printed material weakened the influence of the upper-class patron. Publication by subscription could save the author from obligation to and the possible vagaries of the individual patron, though individuals did solicit subscribers for their protégés, as happened in the case of Hannah More (1745–1833) and Ann Yearsley. This less personal form of patron- age, described as ‘a half-way house between dependence on a single patron to underwrite a book and reliance upon sales’,79 and a ‘collective patron- age’,80 had much in common with the paper credit of speculative invest- ment, as Catherine Ingrassia notes,81 and enabled booksellers to publish without much risk.
Stephen Duck Stephen Duck had an advocate in the Oxford Professor of Poetry, The Reverend Joseph Spence, whose account of Duck’s life, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Poet, was published in 1731. This was subtitled ‘Of his Education; his Methods of Improving himself; how he first engag’d in Poetry; and his great Care in writing. Of each of his particular Poems; of the first Encouragements he met with; and his original Sentiments on several Books, Things, &c. In a letter to a Member of Parliament’. Spence emphasises Duck’s ‘Original Simplicity’, which is ‘soon to be lost’.82 That Duck is to be seen as a natural genius is immediately established: the recipient of the letter is assured that Duck 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 173 had ‘scarce anything of what we call Education’. He ‘had originally no other Teaching than what enabled him to read and write English, nor that any otherwise than at a Charity-School’.83 Nonetheless, Duck’s love of learning and determination to educate himself, particularly in mathemat- ics, is also recorded, and Duck is reported as having worked extra hours in order to buy books. Though Duck had become a good scholar and a poet by his studies, in spite of being employed on his father’s farm and in ser- vice, Spence also advises that ‘from his infancy he has had ‘a Cast in his Mind towards Poetry’.84 This is not an account of a ‘primitive’ genius, but of one who has built upon an inherent talent. Spence’s statement that Duck learned ‘English’ as we learn Latin, and that most of his conversa- tion as well as his writing has come from reading, suggests that Duck’s childhood-acquired language, a Wiltshire dialect, was not proper, correct English, and that he is careful to use a wider and better vocabulary in speaking to his superiors, though there is still some small portion of the ‘Rustick’.85 An edited version of Spence’s account was included in the unauthorised collection of Duck’s poems, Poems on Several Subjects, for which Duck disclaimed responsibility in his first official collection of 1736,Poems on Several Occasions:
I am afraid the Letter relating to myself, wrote by a worthy and learned Gentleman, will be thought an improper Thing in a Publication made by myself. But as I was desir’d to prefix it, by Persons whom I think it an Honour to obey, I hope it will be pardon’d.86
The preface also observes that Duck has ‘not been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from seeing so many Things of mine as are got together in this Book’ (pp. xi–xii.) Several of the poems, he states, are on ‘[s]ubjects that were given me by Persons to whom I have such great Obligations that I always thought their Desires Commands’. Whilst these remarks could be seen as gestures of abjection, the use of ‘I always thought’ as opposed to ‘I think’ might suggest that Duck now chooses his own sub- jects. The 1736 edition was an opportunity to correct the details of Stephen’s life printed in several earlier pirated editions of Poems on Several Subjects and to include revised versions of the poems. Duck refers to the pirated volumes as ‘a very false Account […] by a Person who seems to have had as little regard for Truth as he had for Honesty, when he stole my Poems’ (p. xiii). 174 S. BYRNE
Spence records a chain of events and interested parties by which Duck’s poems came to the notice of people who encouraged or discouraged him. Duck seems to have had a number of patrons and benefactors who made him gifts of small amounts of money and recommended him to others. Spence quotes Duck as having said that in this way, after things had been ‘very bad for us’, he received about £20. One patron, Dr Alured Clarke, writing to another, Mrs Clayton, assures her that Duck has promised ‘not to meddle’ with this largesse:
and if you approve of it, I should be glad to lay it in your hands till I come to town, when I shall have some to add to it, which may be put out upon security for the benefit of his family, or for his own use, if misconduct or other accident should make it expedient for him to return into Wiltshire.87
Clarke later sends Mrs Clayton a bill for the amount he has collected, ‘which you will please to send, if you should intend to make any use of his money before I have the honour of waiting on you’.88 Unlike the patron of Ann Yearsley (discussed later), Dr Clarke has not put Duck’s earnings from his publication in trust, out of the author’s reach, but he is infantilis- ing the poet by suggesting that he cannot or should not handle his own finances. Clarke manages Duck’s reading, selecting the books he will receive, and censoring some. He tells Mrs Clayton that
I should be afraid of his meddling with anything of Lee’s, and have therefore crossed the ninth volume; and as to the eleventh, I would think Steele’s plays would do better by themselves, for I can have no notion of his reading The Rehearsal, or having any relish for the finest wit in the world that is bestowed upon dramatic performances, having never read enough of them to know anything of their rules.89
‘The worthy Doctor and Mrs Clayton appeared to have felt as much anxi- ety with regard to Stephen’s education as if he had been a favourite child.’90 The same attitude of benign patronisation appears in a letter concern- ing Duck’s imminent presentation at court. Clarke writes that he broke the news of ‘what had been done for him’ both cautiously and gradually, and that ‘I thought it best not to let him return to his family till he had taken some time to compose his thoughts’.91 Clarke seems to have been afraid that the news would go to Duck’s head, and is pleased to find that Duck, ‘though he expressed the utmost gratitude’, did not show ‘the least 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 175 exultation of spirit’ and made ‘many just reflections on the change of his condition’. This management of Duck persisted to the extent that when Clarke learned of the death of Mrs Anne Duck whilst her husband was at Windsor, he decided to withhold the news until after the audience.92 Duck is instructed to ‘be wholly under your [Mrs Clayton’s] direction’93 and Mrs Clayton is assured that ‘[w]herever you think proper to send him, I believe it will be a great ease to him to receive orders from you and not to go to any place he shall be invited to during the time he has leave to be absent from Kew’.94 Unlike Ann Yearsley, who was to demand control of herself and her money, Duck seems not to have objected. His published work includes panegyrics to his benefactors, and Poems on Several Occasions is both dedicated to Queen Caroline and includes a poem fulsome in her praise and in gratitude. Even in this, however, he is denied autonomy; his collection is not reserved for his own poems. The first, ‘On Her Majesty’s Bounty to the Thresher’ is by J. Wainwright (pp. xxxi–xxxiii), and the second, ‘To Stephen Duck, Occasion’d by his Poem on Friendship’ by T. Morell (pp. xxxiv–xxx–xxxvi). The second is not preceded by a cap- tioned picture or included in a series of encomia such as that in honour of Sir Thomas Wyatt, but, with the poem to Queen Caroline, precedes the contents page unheralded. The ‘Bounty’ poem, which names Duck by his work and thus station in life, ‘The Thresher’, suggests that the poet couldn’t be trusted with his own acknowledgement of gratitude, and the second reinforces the official image set out in the preface by reiterating that Duck’s Muse is ‘untutor’d’ and that he has been raised from a ‘lowly Seat’ (p. xxxv). The poem emphasises Duck’s honesty, pleasing nature, and friendliness, and attributes his rise not to poetic craft but to his being a model of the friendship about which he writes.
So those Priests we glad Attention give Whose Precepts Sanction from their Lives receive.
Though patrons look for poetic genius, they also require virtue and humility. Duck’s poetry became a novelty and sensation, widely acclaimed and popular, mostly, initially, through the published pirate editions. He was rumoured to be a candidate for the Poet Laureateship after the death of Laurence Eusden in September 1730, a report to which the Grub-Street Journal responded in epigrams which decry his talent and play on his for- mer occupation. The first, ‘From the Pegasus in Grub-Street’, refers to 176 S. BYRNE
Duck as a ‘candidate’ for the laureateship, implying that he in some way put forward his name, and his presumption is therefore mocked in what Keenan calls ample Scriblerian scorn’:95
Shall royal praise be rhym’d by such a ribald, As fopling C – R, or Attorney T – D? Let’s rather wait one year for better luck; One year may make a singing swan of Duck. Great G – ! such servants since thou well can’st lack, Oh! save the Salary, and drink the Sack!
The second, signed ‘Bavius’, appeared the following week:96
Behold! ambitious of the British bays, C – R and DUCK compete in rival lays: But, gentle COLLEY, should thy verse prevail, Thou hast no fence, alas! against the flail: Wherefore thy claim resign, allow his right; For DUCK can thresh, you know, as well as write.97
The same proverb is quoted by Swift in his ‘On Stephen Duck the Thresher, and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram’:
The thresher Duck could o’er the Q—prevail, The Proverb says, ‘No Fence against a Flayl’. From threshing Corn he turns to thresh his brains; For which her M—y allows him Grains. Though ’tis confest, that those who ever saw His Poems, think them all not worth a Straw. Thrice happy Duck, employ’d in threshing Stubble! Thy Toil is lessen’d, and thy Profitsdouble .98
The accusation here doubly damns Duck, for writing worthless poems (reinforced by the image of threshing stubble, which is pointless) and for writing, not just for money, but for ‘profit’, a word associated with trade. Duck was installed as librarian of ‘Merlin’s Cave’, a Gothic cottage orné in Richmond Park, but life as a recipient of the bounty of majesty was not entirely happy. He married twice more and was widowed again. Having pursued a course of reading decreed by Dr Clarke, he mastered the con- ventions of contemporary genres, but remained the butt of a number of lampoons and mocking articles.99 By the time Queen Caroline died in 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 177
1737, his novelty value had declined. He was ordained in 1746, becoming Rector of Byfleet, Surrey, in 1752. The cause of his death in 1756 is unclear,100 but the myth persisted that he committed suicide by drowning. The first of Duck’s own compositions in the 1736 collection, ‘To a Gentleman who Requested A Copy of Verses from the Author’ (pp. 1–4), exhibits the obliging nature as well as the humility of the speaker, who asserts that had he the gentleman’s eloquence, learning, and source of inspiration, he would produce a poem on the life of Christ which would please and delight his dedicatee. Among the references to the poet’s infe- riority and unworthiness, however, are slight fissures:
My Fate compels me silent to remain, For want of Learning to improve my Strain; By which no Thought, tho’ well conceiv’d can rise To full Perfection, but in Embryo dies: Yet my unpolish’d Genius will produce, And bring forth something, tho’ of little Use. (p. 3)
The supposed inutility or worthlessness of the unpolished genius of the silent yet speaking voice is compared to ground that produces only weeds, but significantly, the ground itself is not infertile but has been neglected. ‘Thro’ slothful Man’s Neglect’ it is uncultivated, growing only weeds. ‘Genius’ may be used in the sense of a person’s natural ability or aptitude, but nonetheless would have carried the connotations of exceptional and extraordinary. This accords with the suggestion that the poet has well- conceived thoughts which could rise to perfect expression were they matched with learning, and that he and his poems require cultivation, that is, to be made cultivated and to be cared for. The poem also reminds Duck’s reader that he has had little leisure for composition:
The Field calls me to Labour, I must go: The Kine low after Meat; the hungry Steed, Neighing, complains he wants his usual Feed. (p. 4)
Though apparently humble, the final couplet could seem stinging:
Then Sir, adieu: Accept what you did crave, And be propitious to your humble Slave. 178 S. BYRNE
To a twenty-first-century audience, ‘On Poverty’ (pp. 5–9) doesn’t sit well with the representation of the life of rural labourers in ‘The Thresher’s Labour’. It reads as a catalogue of pious aphoristic insincerities: a list of what people rush to do to avoid the dreaded poverty; the conventional sentiment that the poor man’s meat has relish and his rest is sweet; and the assertion that poverty is less awful in reality than in anticipation. The state- ment that ‘Contented Poverty’s no Dismal thing’, freeing the poor from the cares of unwieldy riches (pp. 6–7) seems particularly humbugging, as does the acceptance of heaven-sent station in life in the closing lines:
Since Wealth can never make the Vicious blest, Nor Poverty subdue the virtuous Breast; Since both from Heav’n’s unerring Hand are sent, Lord, give me either, give me but CONTENT. (p. 9)
This would have been a lesson taught to Stephen Duck all of his life, and he seems to have been no radical. More importantly, perhaps, he was later to be ordained a minister and may have taken the cloth for more than its affording him a living, a status, and further opportunities to pursue scholarship. There is no reason to believe that he did not subscribe to a divine ordination of rank. Nonetheless, the poem that follows ‘On Poverty’, rather than presenting it as an abstraction and a goblin of the imagination, describes some of its causes and effects. Christmas asserts that the final line of ‘On Poverty’ quoted earlier has ‘either’ in an early edition of Duck’s work but that this changed to ‘nei- ther’ in the 1736 authorised, so opposing ‘content’ to both poverty and wealth, asking for neither of the opposed pair.101 Christmas quotes:
Since both from God’s unerring Hand are sent, Lord, give me neither, give me but Content.
This, however, is from the unauthorised edition of 1730 (p. 29), Poems on Several Subjects rather than Poems on Several Occasions, which differs from the 1736 edition considerably, possibly because it was taken from Duck’s drafts, and as the result of poor memory or editing. Here are the final lines in this edition:
Then why should Fantoms discompose the mind? Or Woes, so far from real, fright Mankind? 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 179
Since Wealth is but imaginary Fame, And Poverty is nothing but a Name; Since both from God’s unerring Hand are sent Lord, give me neither, give me but Content.
The 1736 edition (London: Printed for the Author), however, has ‘either’ (p. 9) rather than ‘neither’ and ‘Heav’n’s’ rather than ‘God’s’, which is Duck’s more usual referent. In this context, asking for ‘neither’ wealth nor poverty, ‘content’ means the middle way, a sufficiency rather than the acceptance of poverty as socially or heavenly ordained, whereas the choice of ‘either’ in the authorised version, whether chosen by Duck, his patron, or someone else, implies leaving the choice to Heaven, and ‘content’ implies a desire to have no resistance to the consequences of that choice. The missing lines
Since Wealth can never make the Vicious blest, Nor Poverty subdue the virtuous Breast;
are significant in being structured as an argument: ‘since…nor…there- fore’, which implies a degree of rationalisation if not choice, and an active rejection of the extremes. ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (pp. 10–25), Duck’s best-known poem, offers a lesson in the labour relations of capitalism in the eighteenth-century agrarian economy. The farmer estimates the profits of the land’s yield and directs the workers whose labour will produce it but who will benefit from it much less than he. The poem follows the seasonal occupations of the hired agricultural labourer, which provide a succession of hopes for improvements followed by disappointments. That this is not an idealising pastoral is emphasised by the contrast the Thresher makes between his occupation, which silences his voice, and that of the shepherd, who can sing:
Nor yet, the tedious Labour to beguile And make the passing Minutes sweetly smile, Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale; The voice is lost, drown’d by the louder Flail. (p. 13)
This is very different from the ‘happy labour, love, and social glee’ of Thomson’s ‘Summer’.102 180 S. BYRNE
It might be a stretch to see the voice of the Thresher as silenced politi- cally, but the silencing is certainly isolating. Although there is an inclusive plural pronoun, the noise of the flail prevents communication, and no tales can be shared. The thresher is also alienated, engaged in just one stage of production within which he is used only manually and mechanisti- cally. A detailed description of the monotonous and exhausting labour of threshing corn and peas in a barn whose air is full of choking chaff and dust is followed by a note that variety does eventually come, with the turn to winnowing, but that this activity is even more unpleasant, and unap- preciated, and the workers are berated and demeaned.
The Threshal yields but to the Master’s Curse. He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day; Then swears we’ve idl’d half our Time away: ‘Why look, ye Rogues, d’ye think that this will do? ‘Your Neighbours thresh’d as much again as you.’ Now in our Hands we with our Noisy Tools To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools, But wanting these, we just like School-boys look, When angry Masters view the blotted Book: They cry, their Ink was faulty, and their Pen; We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, t’was cut too Green’. (p. 14)
Spring at last brings an open-air activity, cutting grass, but scything under a hot sun is back-breaking work. So is reaping. The harvest feast seems to offer rest and reward. As the jug is passed, the workers, fully in the moment of celebration and plenty, momentarily see the occasion as culmination and closure, but soon realise the truth:
We think no Toils to come, nor mind the Past. But the next morning soon reveals the Cheat, When the same Toils we must again repeat. (p. 25)
This is reminiscent of Robert Herrick’s ‘The Hock-cart, or Harvest home’,103 which also depicts the temporary and illusory camaraderie between classes at a celebration, and reminds the workers that in order to eat again next year they must begin their seasonal labours over again:
And, you must know, your Lord’s word’s true, Feed him ye must, whose food fils you. 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 181
And that this pleasure is like raine, Not sent ye for to drowne your paine, But for to make it spring againe. (ll.50–54)
Keenan notes that Duck defies the rule of his style-model, Addison, that ‘the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet’.104 By the early 1730s, Duck was both peasant in the sense of non-landowning agricultural worker and poet, but Addison’s term ‘poet’ involves gentility as well as learning and taste. By ‘representing agricultural labour from the ground up’,105 in detail in his modified georgics, rather than in idealising and vague tropes, Duck is unusual. In juxtaposing the mandatory neoclassical references (Ceres, Cyclops, Etna, Vulcan, and Phoebus) with dumplings and sweat, and par- ticulars of material conditions, he is more so. The poem’s ending offers no hope of change, and its seasonal circularity speaks of ‘twas ever this, ‘twill ever be so’:
New-growing labours still succeed the past And growing always new must ever last.
It does not, however, speak of the labourers’ Content. Duck was summoned to Windsor for an audience in October 1730 and pleased the queen to the extent of being given a house and pension. Again, this, by Spence’s account, was judiciously managed in light of Duck’s station.
Her Majesty resolv’d immediately to take him out of his Obscurity, and the Difficulties he had labour’d under […] every thing was consider’d with the greatest Judgement: There was now more danger of his having too much than of his continuing to have too little: the great Goodness of Her Majesty condescended to proportion it self to the Poor Man’s Condition.106
Through the device of assuring his patron that it doesn’t matter that Richmond isn’t in ancient Greece, Duck is able to bring Classical refer- ences to ‘On Richmond Park and Royal Gardens’, and by asserting that Richmond has as much right to ‘deathless fame’ in ‘song’ as Windsor Forest, invites the judgement that his Muse or his song is as good as Pope’s.107 Like Windsor Forest,108 ‘Richmond Park’ uses topography for political ends, though rather than Pope’s (Tory) party politics, Duck’s is a broader message of royalist patriotism. Whereas Pope celebrated the peace 182 S. BYRNE brought about by the Treaty of Utrecht, and hails Queen Anne as (among other things) the goddess Diana and the new Augustus, ‘Richmond Park’ celebrates the peace said to be brought by the second of the house that replaced the Stuarts. The trope of the uncared-for and uncultivated field applied to himself in a poem composed whilst Duck was still working on the land is repeated but transformed in a poem written after he had met the queen and received his pension and house. Before the area became a royal park,
Not so attractive lately shone the Plain, A gloomy Waste not worth the Muses’ Strain Where thorny Brakes the Travell’r repell’d, And Weeds and Thistles overspread the Field. (p. 73)
The land that King George and Queen Caroline have had enclosed, land- scaped, and ornamented109 stands for the throne’s imposition of order on the nation, the repelled weeds analogous to invading foreigners:
Till Royal GEORGE, and Heav’nly CAROLINE Bid Nature in harmonious Lustre shine; The sacred Fiat thro’ the Chaos rung, And Symmetry from wild disorder sprung.
‘Great George’ is crowned with ‘peaceful laurels’ and has ‘Albion’s Safety lab’ring in his Breast’ (p. 75); he
Guards happy Britain, with his floating Tow’rs, From purple Slaughter and invading Pow’rs.
Duck’s confidence in his status as poet and his poetic powers shows in his lines
Then Richmond Hill renown’d in verse shou’d grow, And Thames re-echo to the song below; A second Eden in my page shou’d shine, And MILTON’s Paradise submit to mine. (p. 69)
His poetic persona no longer works productive farmland as part of a group but contemplates parkland in solitude, apostrophised in later sections of the poem: 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 183
With thee the mind, abstracted from the Crew, May study Nature, and her Ends pursue; With thee I hear the feather’d Warblers sing, With thee survey the Beauties of the Spring. (p. 75)
The British ‘swain’, no longer an autobiographical figure but one observed, ‘bless’d with Peace and Plenty, smiles’, unlike his foreign counterpart. The injustice touched on in ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ is displaced onto European countries whose better climate does not compensate for the tyranny that withholds nature’s bounty from the ‘Poor Peasants’. The ‘sons of Britannia’, free from such evils, are enjoined to
Enjoy the Sweets of Peace and Liberty; A gracious Sov’reign smiles upon the Throne, And Heav’n confirms the happy Realm his own. (p. 76)
Rather than ‘the mouthpiece of all those on whose shoulders the rural order rested’,110 the voice is that of a court functionary, but poems such as this should not be dismissed as more insincere or less authentic than ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ because they don’t refer to perspiration. Raymond Williams expresses disappointment with the later part of Duke’s poetic career, as though betrayed by the poems’ insufficient left-leaning, but, as Kirstie Blair points out, this is to ignore what might have been Duck’s own ambitions and interests, and to make the focal point of evaluation one small part of his output.111 Klaus writes that never before ‘had there been such a truthful description of workaday routine in verse,112 but to value Duck for his authenticity or solidity of specification is to devalue him as a poet.113 It is also to assume that he regarded himself throughout his career as part of a category of plebeian or labouring-class poets, a category of writers whose similar backgrounds entail similar styles, subjects, or approaches. Jeffrey Cox notes that one finds oneself already part of humanly constructed categories: ‘a race, a class, a gender’; but ‘that these are certainly not constructed by me’.114 This is of course true to a point, but I would argue that just as some poets may reject and oppose such constructions, some, particularly twentieth-century poets, have con- structed themselves within categories of class. Though after the success of Poems on Several Occasions poets aligned themselves with Duck through poetic epistles and other means, and thus constructed themselves as in that category, there is no evidence to show that in his later work Duck con- 184 S. BYRNE structed himself in that way.115 Nor is the use of Duck as a brand with which to associate oneself always indicative of admiration and compatriot- ship. Robert Tatersal namechecks Duck in poem and collection, and pro- duces a poem, ‘The Bricklayer’s Labour’, in parallel to Duck’s ‘Thresher’s Labour’, uses the same somewhat sexualised reference to Duck’s patronage by the Queen (‘prevail’) and the same reductive synecdoche as the Grub- Street Journal for both poets. The tone is both envious and adversarial, and marks a sense of social superiority rather than equality between the skilled bricklayer and the alleged unskilled thresher:
Yea, Modern Times afford a Rustick Flail, Whose Threshing lays cou’d over Queens prevail; And why not Bricklayers exercise their Quill; Whose Art surmounts a Country Thresher’s Skill: A Flail, a Trowel, Weapons very good, If fitly us’d and rightly understood; But close engag’d, beware the useless Flail; The Trowel then can terribly prevail. (p. 24)
Like Tatersal, John Frizzle suggests that his working life is at least as noisy and unconducive to writing as Duck’s once was, and that were he to be released from this, he too would write well:
And I could see the Hermitage, even I, As well as you, my little Skill might try. (ll.21–22)
Ann Yearsley The patronage by Hannah More of Ann Yearsley may have been modelled on that of More’s own patron, David Garrick, with concomitant benefits and drawbacks.116 Garrick had brought More to the attention of his friends, had encouraged her writing, had arranged performances of her plays, and enabled her to make money during his patronage. What he didn’t do was to enable More to build a career for herself that would be self-sustaining after his death.117 More encouraged Yearsley, introduced her to a network of friends who would similarly promote her interests, and organised publication by subscription for her Poems on Several Occasions (1785). The difference between the two kinds of patronage was deter- mined by the class of the protégée; More was of the middling sort of the 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 185 gentle rank whereas Yearsley sold milk from door to door and her family had reputedly nearly starved to death in the winter before she came to More’s attention.118 Kerri Andrews quotes from a letter of Elizabeth Montagu which expresses anxiety about the possible consequences of patronage or charitable giving, and seeks reassurance that the person for whom More has solicited interest is of a fit disposition to receive it without ill effect:
I beg of you to inform yourself, as much as you can, of her temper, disposi- tion, and moral character. I speak not this out of an apprehension of merely wasting a few guineas, but lest I should do harm where I intend to confer benefit. It has sometimes happened to me, that, by an endeavour to encour- age talents and cherish virtue, by driving from them the terrifying spectre of pale poverty, I have introduced a legion of little demons: vanity, luxury, idle- ness, and pride, have entered the cottage the moment poverty vanished.119
Letters from and to More state an intention to oversee Yearsley’s income, her behaviour, and her morals; she is not to be left to direct her own life. Montagu warns against the dangers of allowing Yearsley to give up her labours in favour of a career as a poet (and thus a rise in rank) and More agrees that ‘[y]ou judge with your usual wisdom in saying that she shou’d not be corrupted by being made idle or useless’.120 Horace Walpole coun- sels: ‘Were I not persuaded by the samples you have sent me, Madam, that this good thing has real talents, I should not advise […] encouraging her propensity lest it should divert her from the care of her family, and after the novelty is over, leave her worse than she was.’121 An allusion to Stephen Duck cautions against setting up an example which will be followed by other labourers, who will fail in the enterprise. He advises More to be a ‘mistress’ as well as a friend, and in suggesting that Yearsley’s reputation as a poet will bring her more customers assumes that she should remain in her designated sphere:
Your poetess can scarce be more miserable than she is, and even the reputa- tion of being an authoress may procure her customers … I am sure you will not only give her counsels for her works, but for her conduct; and your gentleness will blend them so judiciously, that she will mind the friend as well as the mistress. She must remember that she is a Lactilla, not a Pastora, and is to tend real cows, not Arcadian sheep. 186 S. BYRNE
Walpole’s use of the indefinite article denies Yearsley singularity, as does the epithet ‘A Milk Woman of Bristol’ on the title page of her first collec- tion.122 Yearsley might be a rare plebeian poet, but she is to remember that she is a peasant. The prefatory letter to Elizabeth Montagu which More attached to Poems on Several Occasions gives an affecting account of the dire straits of Yearsley’s family before their rescue by a benevolent gentleman. It also informs Montagu, and thus the public, that More has no intention of encouraging Yearsley in the way feared by her friends:
It is not intended to place her in such a state of independence as might seduce her to devote her time to the idleness of Poetry. I hope she is con- vinced that the making of verses is not the great business of human life; and that, as a wife and mother, she has duties to fill, the smallest of which is of more value than the finest verses she can write: but as it has pleased God to give her these talents, may they not be made an instrument, to mend her situation, if we publish a small volume of her Poems by subscription?123
More makes a silent distinction between poetry as idleness when it replaces manual labour and poetry as an art professed by the higher classes, and she offers reassurance to Montagu and the other subscribers that she would not have proposed this scheme were she not convinced that it would not unsettle the beneficiary: ‘I should be afraid of proposing such a measure, lest it should unsettle the sobriety of her mind, and by exciting her vanity, indispose her for the laborious employment of her humble condition.’124 Though More refers to a sober ‘mind’, the lexical choice of sobriety, allud- ing also to insobriety, evokes a common complaint about the working classes’ propensities which the piece anticipates.125 As reported by Yearsley, More reverses this praise, using the same register against Yearsley in their later quarrel. The reference to the avoidance of creating vanity and unwill- ingness to return to hard labour also attempts to defuse concerns about workers becoming discontent with their allotted place in society. The opposition between making verses and the ‘business’ of life, and reference to the ‘talent’ of poetic composition as a gift from God alludes to a strain of anxiety which is to become more apparent in the writing of Wordsworth in the decades following the phenomenon of Yearsley. Even more so than Spence’s introduction of Duck to the public, the preface to Yearsley’s work represents her as a ‘natural’ poet, and expresses amazement that someone ‘unlettered’126 who had never seen a dictionary and did not know ‘a single rule of grammar’ could write poetry. That 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 187 hyperbole is nonsense, since Yearsley had internalised sufficient rules of grammar to generate intelligible sentences in speech and writing, but is in keeping with the meagre extent of Yearsley’s alleged reading: the Scriptures, one poem by Milton, one by Young, one by Pope, a few of Shakespeare’s plays, and the Georgics127—a collection suggesting the autodidact who happens on scattered fragments but cannot pursue an author’s oeuvre or a period or genre. In a similar vein, More reports asking how Yearsley had encountered the Classical references she uses, and being told that Yearsley had copied them from prints in shop windows. More asserts that Yearsley achieved her ideas about literature ‘without ever having conversed with any body above her own level’. Yearsley seems to have played to that role in her poetry, representing herself as a lonely figure in ‘native wilds’ rather than a well-populated area near a spa town not far from Bristol,128 and without intellectual stimulation:
Oft as I trod my native wilds alone, Strong gusts of thought would rise, but rise to die; The portals of the swelling soul ne’er oped By liberal converse, rude ideas strove Awhile for vent, but found it not, and died129
This would have suited the comfortable idea that the literate peasant was rare and the peasant-poet an even rarer aberration, and have flattered the patrons who could be congratulated on providing the long-desired circle of intellectuals within which the poet could thrive. The ‘natural poet’, a child of nature, naturally writes about nature, but requires the guidance and example of his or her natural superiors in order to polish the instinc- tual response into art.130 In ‘On Mrs Montagu’, Yearsley describes herself as
Uncouth, unciviliz’d, and rudely rough, Unpolish’d, as the form thrown from Heaven. (pp. 104–105 ll.51–52) and words such as ‘savage’ abound. In ‘Night’, her poems are presented as
wild and untaught rapture, form’d From simple nature, in her artless guise. (p. 15, ll.219–220) but the poems themselves belie this, indicating education and effort in their employment of not only Classical allusions but also the conventions 188 S. BYRNE of contemporary sentiment, complex sentences, and engagement with contemporary issues. (Landry and others argue that Yearsley’s work looks forward to ideas and forms of Romanticism.131) Unlike Duck’s, her poems do not much represent labour or the struggles of rural poor. Her ‘Poem on The Inhumanity of The Slave Trade’ uses the register of sensibility to call for empathy:
But come, ye souls who feel for human woe, Tho’ drest in savage guise! Approach, thou son, Whose heart would shudder at a father’s chains, And melt o’er thy lov’d brother as he lies Gasping in torment undeserv’d. Oh, sight Horrid and insupportable! far worse Than an immediate, an heroic death; Yet to this sight I summon thee. Approach, Thou slave of avarice, that canst see the maid Weep o’er her inky sire!
There is no evident empathy, however, with the swains and milkmaids in her first collection. A reference in ‘Clifton Hill’ to Lactilla milking a cow in the snow is unusual in her work, and so conventional as to seem at sev- eral removes: ‘Lactilla, shivering tends her fav’rite cow’ (p. 108, l.20) brings to mind John Gay’s ‘The Hare and Many Friends:
Love calls me hence; a fav’rite cow Expects me near yon barley mow132
Yearsley’s representation of the countryside has none of the technicalities of agriculture and viticulture of the Georgics or the sense of strained effort in Duck’s ‘The Thresher’s Labour’. Lactilla traverses rather than works the landscape, focusing on the emotions it evokes. Her ‘ardent eye’ (p. 120, l.198) finds ‘joy serene’ (l.199), and her bosom swells in ‘guiltless rapture’ at the sight of Clifton Hill (p. 121, l.203). The description of the thoughts and feelings as ‘gusts’ and ‘vents’ maintains the pathetic fallacy requisite in the close association between narrator and nature, and Lactilla’s melan- choly is frequently mentioned, but there is little of the introspection of Cowper’s or Gray’s work. Whilst Lactilla avoids assuming the (literally and metaphorically) elevated role of the prospect-poet by describing herself as walking through the landscape and tending to look up towards the hills and rocks, rather than commanding a scenic prospect from above, she is 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 189 nonetheless clearly not of the swains and milkmaids who also inhabit the country around Clifton and feel but cannot understand or articulate their response to the landscape and the elements.133 Her poetic personae resist the subject position imposed on her by her patrons, taking on the perspec- tives of a writer of sentiment, offering poems of feeling and locodescriptive poems; an ecomiast, writing in praise of and in gratitude to Mrs Montagu; and a reformer, writing on slavery and the position of women. ‘Clifton Hill’ even proffers advice to young women of fashion, opposing indolence and fashion to healthful exercise and fresh air (pp. 116–118, ll.132– 160).134 These bold claims to the rights of opinion and perspective of middle-class writers are qualified by a surely disingenuous parenthetical interjection and apologetic direct address. The section giving advice and admonishment to the fashionable beauties brought to be cured by Clifton’s hot wells asserts that ‘Conceit’ and ‘Fell Dissipation’ bring death, ‘Fashion’ being the crime (pp. 117–118, l.152, ll.159–160), but interjects an antici- patory exculpation: ‘Blame not my rustic lay, nor think me rude’ (p. 117, l.151). The following section, on the flora and fauna of Leigh Wood, is interrupted by
(Alas! if transmigration should prevail, I fear Lactilla’s soul must house in snail.) (p. 119, ll.177–178)
The journey recorded in ‘Clifton Hill’ from Winter to Spring and across hills reaches a vantage point which turns ‘Lactilla’s’ attention from ground- level animals such as toad, mouse, rat, and mole to commerce. The Bristol Channel is hailed:
useful channel! Commerce spreads her wings From either pole her various treasure brings. (p. 120, ll.187–188)
Yearsley’s reference to herself as ‘Lactilla’ in this poem and ‘On Mrs Montagu’ (p. 106, l.70) of course alludes to her occupation,135 but in naming herself in Classical form she also aligns herself with coteries of eighteenth-century women of a higher class, perhaps specifically with the Blue Stockings Society, which included Hannah More (Stella) and Elizabeth Montagu, both of whom feature in the ‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo’.136 She drops ‘milk- woman’ from the title page of her poem on slavery, and appears in a con- temporary portrait under that name but in the dress of a middle-class 190 S. BYRNE woman.137 Whilst Yearsley’s social position is clear to More and Walpole, her presentation of it is ambivalent. Given that Hannah More’s own social position rank was not of the highest, since her family was neither titled nor in receipt of unearned income, it is not difficult to speculate, as Waldron does, that Yearsley did not see herself separated from her patron by as wide a social gulf as More evidently did.138 Poems on Several Occasions achieved both popular and critic success, quickly going into a second and third edition, receiving positive reviews in the Critical Review and Monthly Review, and earning £350 after deduc- tion of the publishing expenses. As Garrick had done for her, More took care of the profits, but whereas Garrick invested More’s initial literary earnings (about £600) and left her 5% annual interest to use as she wished, More placed Yearsley’s income in a trust fund whose trustees were More and Montagu. Yearsley would have to go to these trustees at any time she wanted to have her own money, and to justify its release. This may have been the trigger for the end of the relationship, but other offences were alleged by both parties. More’s emphasis in the preface on Yearsley’s low station in life and the privations suffered by her family may have been unsanctioned; each alleged offensive behaviour on the part of the other. Yearsley put her side of the case in a ‘narrative’, an address to the subscrib- ers, which she printed after More’s preface in the fourth edition of the collection, and she included the deed of trust and her application to have it given to her in her second collection.139 In her preface to Poems on Several Occasions, More refers to correcting the ‘grossest’ mistakes, ‘false concords’, and ‘inaccuracies of various kinds’ in the poems, which sug- gests that she performed an editorial role, and the ‘Advertisement’ which follows the subscribers list is written by ‘The Editor’.140 The extent to which the poems were the result of collaboration is unclear, however. In her narrative, Yearsley states that she asked for her manuscript copies and quotes More as saying that they are at the printers and burnt, and notes that she cannot therefore refute the claim that her work received ‘great ornament and addition from a learned and superior genius’, but that she will be judged by her second collection.141 Notably, in this second publica- tion, Yearsley’s epithet has lost the indefinite article and become ‘Milkwoman of Clifton, Near Bristol’. The aftermath of the contretemps with someone who resisted abjection might perhaps be seen in More’s moralist fictions, which invariably reward the industrious poor hero or heroine for remaining humble and with lim- 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 191 ited ambition.142 Donna Landry argues that after her bruising relationship with Yearsley, More ceased to produce tracts which assert the need to teach the poor to read in order to teach them good principles, and instead by 1801 advocated ‘no writing for the poor’, and only such education as will prepare them for service.143 Those tracts, requested and encouraged by Bishop Porteous, and designed to discourage ideas gleaned from radi- cal publications such as Price’s Observations of Civil Liberty (1776) or Paine’s Rights of Man (then being made available cheaply) or Age of Reason (1794–1795), may not entirely reflect More’s position, however, as Jane Nardin argues.144 For Anne Stott, ‘Hannah More, the robust anti- democrat, the friend of duchesses and countesses, was proving a surprising agent of social mobility’.145 Yearsley found a second patron, Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, as well as other subscribers and benefac- tors,146 some far from wealthy or high-born.147 She published further works, including her last, The Rural Lyre, in 1796, by which time she had been running a circulating library for three years, an occupation which Waldron categorises as respectable commerce.148 Felsenstein finds Yearsley’s attitude to the patronage she received one of humiliation and irritation. Though she wrote fulsome letters and poems of gratitude to her benefactors, ‘there is no doubt that Yearsley bristled at the demeaning treatment that she too often received from those who considered them- selves her social superiors’. He cites a letter in response to a remark made ‘Anthony Pasquin’ (John Williams) at one of Yearsley’s plays, presumably about the author’s benefit performance: ‘Damn her!! tell her I gave her four Shillings last Night!’ Yearsley’s reply is to return the four shillings in a note dripping with irony and scorn.149 This refusal to accept patronisa- tion tamely may have resulted from the sense that the patronage system had made Yearsley more rather than less dependent and more of an employee, since as a milkwoman she would have been in a long-established traditional, respectable role and whilst dependent on custom, self- employed.150 Nonetheless, Felsenstein notes, with the exception of the early More contretemps, Yearsley was always ‘more genuflective than bel- ligerent’ in her relationship with patrons.151 More had stated that her aim in setting up schools had been ‘to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety’.152 The patron’s emphasis on the rarity of the discovery’s ‘natural’ talent would have been difficult to maintain by the time Robert Dodsley’s later 192 S. BYRNE publications were in press. The conceptual category of plebeian, labour- ing, or uneducated poet was well established and the journals had printed many more poems in tribute to and imitation of Duck, few of which led to his success. Far from all of these were written by agricultural workers. Klaus includes among his ten examples of plebeian poets cobblers, bricklayers, a pipe-maker, and a silk-weaver, noting that ‘literary talent seems to have been evenly distributed among the different sections of the working population’.153 He omits washerwoman (Mary Collier) and, in the case of Dodsley, service can be added to the list. Whereas self-avowed (however disingenuously) uneducated or autodidact poets such as Duck and Yearsley could be patronised as simple, unpretending, unsophisticated country folk, the (at least partly) schooled urban footman evoked a differ- ent stereotype, and required a different kind of promotion.
Robert Dodsley The career of Robert Dodsley, which slightly precedes and is contempo- rary with those of Duck and Yearsley, is in some ways more significant, since its span took Dodsley from plebeian poet to patron, and enabled Dodsley to move from commodity to commodifier. Born to a schoolmas- ter, Dodsley was apprenticed to a stocking-maker at 14, but either ran away or bought his indentures, went to London, and lived in poverty until entering service as a footman. His background of prosperous farmers and malters, and the education he received at the Free School of Mansfield where his father was an usher or headmaster, would not classify him as either unlearned or impoverished, and would have placed him socially above Duck and Yearsley. His time in service, and the contemporary ten- dency to see the non-gentle class as monolithic, however, labelled him as a labouring poet. Whilst in service, Dodsley received encouragement from a number of people, the first of whom may have been Sir Griffith Boynton, whom Dodsley remembers in A Muse in Livery, or The Footman’s Miscellany). He attributes his acquisition of articulacy and wit to standing behind chairs at dinner and listening to the conversation of another employer, Dartiquenave (sometimes given as Dartineuf), friend of Pope and John Gay. ‘Servitude’ (1729), whilst a didactic poem instructing fellow servants in the proper performance of their duties, is also a calling card for Dodsley which establishes his credentials as an industrious and honest working man.154 This could work against the image of the London footman as 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 193 sharp, dishonest, rakish, and spendthrift. ‘The Miseries of Poverty’ fol- lowed two years later. Solomon argues that the impetus for Dodsley’s An Epistle from a Footman in London to the Celebrated Stephen Duck (1731) came from Pope, and that it was Pope’s genius for literary promotion that led to changes in Dodsley’s style, booksellers, and even typography.155 Whilst seeming to praise Duck, the Epistle describes him as an apprentice whose lack of education and refinement mean that he has yet to reach the summit of his ability. Seeming also to deplore the disparagement of Duck by ‘censorious Criticks’ on the basis of his unlettered rural upbringing, the poem itself refers to Duck’s ‘little Failings’ and ‘tender and uncultivated Muse’, asking the critics,
th’ you no master Strokes discern Think what could be expected from a Barn.
The barn may reference the frontispiece to the seventh edition of the unauthorised Poems on Several Subjects, which represented Duck as an etiolated figure between a barn and a desk, holding a thresher’s flail in one hand and a book on which is written ‘Milton’ in the other. Duck looks at neither but gazes upwards whilst another worker looks towards him, open-mouthed. Dodsley’s ‘Barn’ as metonymic representation of agricul- tural life, from which little should be expected, inverts the myth of the natural genius of pastoral, and therefore allows that urban life below stairs might equally produce a poet. A subsequent employer, Jane Lowther, daughter of Viscount Lonsdale, gave Dodsley access to her library and organised the subscriptions to his collection A Muse in Livery, or, The Footman’s Miscellany (1732). That there were nearly 200 of these obviated the need for a single benefactor patron, and provided Dodsley with some powerful and influential readers (or possessors) of his work, especially among the Lowther family’s Whig connections, including Robert Walpole. This edition of April 1732 fol- lowed an earlier, shorter version, A Muse in Livery. A Collection of Poems published in February 1732 by John Nourse, which went into a second, slightly revised edition in May. Solomon notes that whereas Dodsley made money, Nourse lost, and that the model Dodsley had followed for his contract was that of Pope’s with Bernard Lintot, which had resulted in Pope rather than Lintot making a profit.156 Though not a patron in the way of Hannah More, Pope was a mentor, aide, and friend to Dodsley. 194 S. BYRNE
Solomon finds it undoubtable that Dodsley was soliciting the same kind of royal patronage as given to Duck in his dedication of the longer, subscription edition, which in spite of the impressive list of those who had paid in advance, entreats ‘some generous Mind to support an honest and a grateful Heart’.157 The dedication is addressed to ‘Such of the Nobility and Gentry as have done me the honour to Subscribe’ and is followed by the list of subscribers, the ‘Effigies Authoris, or, the Mind of the Frontispiece’, and ‘An Entertainment Designed for Her Majesty’s Birth- Day’, which together set out Dodsley’s stall. ‘Effigies Authoris’ explains the significance of the emblematic illustration which appears not as a fron- tispiece but between pages of the dedication. This shows a figure standing by a blighted tree under a dark sky with the sun just visible in the upper left corner of the page. The figure’s right foot is chained to despair and right hand chained to poverty, and pulled towards misery, folly, and igno- rance, and whose left hand, with a winged bracelet at the wrist, reaches towards the inaccessible happiness, virtue, and knowledge. This accords with the dedication’s expressed desire not for monetary gifts but for removal from the ‘low Condition’ from which the poet cannot hope to rise without help. The profit motive is absent other than in the mention of want of Fortune, which is ambiguous, and which is associated with want of friends and ‘all the Advantages of a liberal Education or a polite Converse’.158 It is the want of the latter that is said to have retarded Dodsley’s progress: ‘one or both of which are absolutely necessary to show even the best natural Genius in a tolerable Light’. Condition is made to connote cultural attainment and milieu, and the Dedication suppresses the appeal for money within the guise of an appeal to be helped to rise to a higher culture. Further poems and works in other genres followed, but Dodsley mean- while had diversified into publishing, firstly learning from Pope’s book- seller, Lawton Gilliver,159 who had published several of Dodsley’s own works, then, in Spring 1735, using the proceeds of his publications and with help from Pope, opened his own bookshop ‘At the Sign of Tully’s Head’, in Pall Mall. Under this imprint, Dodsley published works by, among others, Samuel Johnson, Pope, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith. In Solomon’s judgement, Dodsley is ‘the most impor- tant bookseller of the period, patron of almost every midcentury poet still read today’, and his bookshop ‘a focus for the shift in sensibility from neoclassicism to romanticism’.160 Among Dodsley’s first publications were works of Pope, and authors in Pope’s circle followed. Pope helped Dodsley 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 195 to find contributors to his periodicals and himself provided articles and advice.161 Dodsley produced poetry in praise and gratitude, and Pope’s patronage of Dodsley’s business may have been in part motivated by the desire for greater control over publication of his own works, but their relationship seems to have been closer to one of friendship than purely of patron and client.162 As a bookseller, Dodsley no longer professed fraternity with the plebeian poets. The first three volumes of the six-volume Collection of Poems by Several Hands,163 taken by generations of critics as ‘the definitive indicator of the state of poetry at the mid-century’ are aris- tocratic and Augustan in character.164 Suarez attributes this to the editorial guidance of Pope, and Pope’s belief that poetry must be saved from the ‘defilement by “Smithfield Muses”, “Grub Street”, sycophantic laureates, and other compromising, pretentious or low-born influences’.165 Of the 226 poems 97 are by peers or addressed to peers, and almost all are by friends or connections of Pope’s or poets approved by Pope.166 Many of the poems lament the decline of wit and taste, the state of popular culture, and the popularity of poets such as Colley Cibber, holding up Pope as the supreme example of the antithesis of this decline, until in the final 45 pages, four memorial poems ‘effect for the reader a complete and indis- putable apotheosis of Pope’.167 Dodsley was neither the first nor the last of the plebeian poets but was one of the most successful, neither losing a patron to death nor falling into poverty. His social ascent from footman to bookseller and friend of the literati, however, came through his entering the bookselling trade, not through his poetry, which might have been dismissed as a short-lived nov- elty, and he as another ‘Duckling’ writing in imitation of Duck and in hope of his success. Recent critical engagement with less well-known eighteenth-century texts, made possible by the publication of texts such as Roger Lonsdale’s Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse168 and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry,169 and the accessibility of online col- lections of eighteenth-century texts, has brought reassessments of the work of plebeian poets, but that work is still often studied for its historical value, and its literary value found wanting. What Simon White calls the ‘narrative of decline’, the received wisdom that plebeian poets’ work begins as original and interesting but becomes derivative and weak as they imitate the forms and tropes of the educated, has been pervasive, but as White and others show, this cannot be applied to Bloomfield, the first subject of the next section.170 196 S. BYRNE
Notes 1. The term ‘plebeian’ is preferred by Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1985), p. 2, whereas most other critics prefer ‘labouring- class’; see, for example, Blair and Mina Gorji, op. cit., and Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Christmas discusses the descriptors used by writers since Southey, and concludes that plebeian or labouring-class are prefer- able. William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work: Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 39–40. 2. Raymond Williams cites Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) as one of the first texts to use the term ‘industry’ in this way. Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958); rprnt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. xiii. 3. The poem references the dissenting Warrington Academy, where Barbauld’s father, Dr John Aiken, taught. Dissenting academies did not customarily follow the Classical curriculum. 4. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘The Invitation, to Miss B…’, Poems (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1773), pp. 13–24; Virgil, Eclogue X ll.42–43. 5. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 100. 6. Guillory, op. cit., p. 101. 7. Edmund Waller in Poems Written upon Several Occasions and Several Persons, revd and expanded edn (London: Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Mosley, 1645), pp. 236–238. 8. Daniel Defoe, ‘Of Academies’, An Essay Upon Projects (London: Printed for Thomas Cockerill, 1697), pp. 227–251 (229–234). 9. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712), p. 8. 10. Joseph Addison, Spectator II 165 (8 September 1711), p. 150. 11. Edward Phillips, New World of Words (1658), John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, ed James Kinsley 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) III p. 1060, quoted in Lynda Mugglestone, ‘The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language’ in Linda Pillière, Wilfred Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec and Diana Lewis, eds, Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 89–95 (90). 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 197
12. Samuel Johnson, Preface, A Dictionary of the English Language in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. To which are prefixed, a his- tory of the language, and an English grammar (London: J. and P. Knapton, T. and T. Longman, C. Hitch and L. Hawes, A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755) C2. 13. Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (1983) 2nd edn (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 23–24. 14. Easthope, op. cit., p. 52. 15. Easthope, op. cit., p. 53. 16. Martin Halpern, ‘On the Two Chief Metrical Modes in English’, PMLA 77: 3 (June 1962), pp. 177–186 (177), quoted in Easthope, op. cit., p. 76. 17. Easthope, op. cit., pp. 54–55. 18. Easthope, op. cit., p. 56. 19. Easthope, op. cit., p. 64. 20. Easthope, op. cit., p. 65. 21. James Raven, ‘The Book Trades’ in Isobel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), pp. 1–34 (10). 22. See Catherine Ingrassia, ‘Money’ in Pat Rogers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 175–185 (177). 23. See, for example, Alexander Pope, Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst (London: Printed and Re-printed in Dublin by Sylvanus Pepyat, 1733). 24. The Act for preventing abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unli- censed books and pamphlets, and for regulation of printing and printing presses (10 June 1662). 25. James Ralph, The Case of Authors By Profession or Trade Stated, With Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public, No Matter by Whom (London: R. Griffiths, 1758). 26. Ralph, op. cit., p. 7. 27. Ralph, op. cit., p. 8. 28. Ralph, op. cit., p. 22. 29. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in which are Included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 4 vols (London: Printed for the Author and D. Wilson, 1751) IV p. 100. 30. Charles Churchill, The Author (London: Printed for W. Flexney, G. Kearsley et al., 1763), p. 12. 31. Ralph, op. cit., p. 58. 198 S. BYRNE
32. Letter from Alexander Pope to William Wycherley in The Letters of Mr Alexander Pope and Several of His Friends (London: Printed for J. Knapton, L. Gilliver, J. Brindley and R. Dodsley, 1737), p. 22. 33. Williams, op. cit., p. xiv. 34. E.P. Thompson, ‘Education and Experience’ (The Fifth Annual Albert Mansbridge Memorial Lecture (1968) in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1997), pp. 7–8. 35. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 6–7. 36. James Thomson, The Seasons (London: Printed for John Millan, 1730). ‘Winter’ was published in 1726, ‘Summer’ in 1727, ‘Spring’ in 1728, and ‘Autumn’ in The Seasons. 37. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 9–11. 38. Guillory, op. cit., p. 99. 39. Guillory, ibid. 40. Guillory, op. cit., p. 102. 41. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 6–7. In a sense the lack of Holy Peasant myth is accounted for by the paucity of peasants in England after 1700, if that term is defined as ‘subsistence or neo-subsistence farmer’. See Roger A.E. Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850’ Journal of Peasant Studies (6 January 1979), p. 115, cited by Christmas, op. cit., p. 42. Christmas’s note. 42. Octavius Gilchrist, ‘Some Account of John Clare, An Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, London Magazine I (January 1820), pp. 7–11 in Mark Storey, ed., John Clare, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 35–42 (p. 37). 43. William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’ in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 262. Subsequent line references will be to this edition unless otherwise stated. 44. Barry MacSweeney, ‘Wolf Tongue’ in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965– 2000 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), pp. 68–72. 45. Quoted in Allan Cunningham, The Works of Robert Burns with His Life (London: James Cochran, 1834) 8 vols, I, p. 35. 46. Nigel Leaske asks ‘Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?’ in Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 16–33. 47. Henry MacKenzie, Untitled editorial, The Lounger 97 (9 December 1786) in Alexander Chalmers, John Johnson et al., eds, British Essayists with Prefaces Historical and Biographical XXXVIII (London: 1808), pp. 300–307 (300). 48. MacKenzie, op. cit., p. 306. 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 199
49. Leaske, op. cit., pp. 16–33 (17). 50. James Macaulay, ‘Rhyming Epistle to Mr R—B—, Ayrshire’, Edinburgh Evening Courant (23 June 1787), quoted in Low, op. cit., pp. 83–85. 51. MacKenzie, ibid. 52. See, for example, The works of Robert Burns; with an account of his life, and a criticism on his writings. To which are prefixed, some observations on the character and condition of the Scottish peasantry, eds Thompson (no first name) and James Currie, 4 vols, I (London: Thomas Cadell, 1802), p. 4. 53. Unsigned notice, the Edinburgh Magazine IV (October 1786), pp. 284– 288 quoted in Donald A. Low, Robert Burns, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 63–64. 54. Low, ibid., Low’s translation. 55. Robert Southey, Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets to Which are Added some Attempts in Verse by John Jones An Old Servant (1831); (London: H.G. Bonn, 1836). 56. Southey, op. cit., p. 12. 57. Southey, op. cit., p. 13. 58. Southey, op. cit., p. 24. 59. Southey, op. cit., p. 105. 60. See Steve Van-Hagen, ‘“But Genius is the Special Gift of God!” The Reclamation of “Natural Genius” in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse’ in John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 55–69 (55). 61. Plato, Ion, ll.333–334, ed and transl R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge: Heffer, 1932). 62. Aristotle, Poetics I: iv, ed and transl. S.H. Butcher, The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 15–17. 63. Anon, Latin aphorism. 64. Longinus On the Sublime, ed and trans. H.L. Havell (London and New York: Macmillan, 1890) II, p. 4. 65. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: Printed for William Ponsonby 1595), n.p. 66. The Spectator 160 (3 September 1711), p. 238. 67. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition. In a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison (Dublin: Printed for P. Wilson, 1759), p. 8. 68. Edward Young, ‘Epistle I ‘in Two Epistles to Mr Pope Concerning the Authors of the Age (London: Printed by S. Powell for George Risk, 1730), pp. 5–6. 69. For complaints about the proliferation of writing in general and poetry in particular, see ‘Memoirs of Society of Grub-Street’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (I:55 21 January 1731), p. 268; Richard West, Letter to 200 S. BYRNE
Horace Walpole (12 January 1736) Gray and his Friends: Letters and Relics in Great Part Hitherto Unpublished, ed D.C. Tovey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), pp. 88–89. 70. Young, op. cit., pp. 15–16. 71. Horace, Ars Poetica ll.295–298, transl. R. Rushton Fairclough, Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica (1926); rprnt (London: Heinemann, 1947; Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 475. 72. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius; and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry (London Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1767), p. 37. 73. Duff, op. cit., p. 38. 74. Hannah More, ‘Sensibility, A Poetical Epistle’ in Sacred Dramas Chiefly Intended for Young Persons, The Subjects Taken from The Bible, to which is added, Sensibility, A Poem (London: Thomas Cadell, 1782), p. 273. 75. Quoted in a letter from Capel Lofft to George Bloomfield (1 March 1800) The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, eds Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ bloomfield_letters/HTML/letterEEd.25.21.html. 76. Duff, op. cit., pp. 271–272. 77. Betty Rizzo, ‘The Patron as Poet-Maker: The Politics of Benefaction’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991), pp. 241–266 (242) quoted in Van-Hagen, op. cit., p. 56. 78. Van-Hagen, op. cit., pp. 61–63. 79. W.A. Speck, ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700– 1750’, in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 47–48. 80. Arnold Hauser, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (München, 1969), p. 565 quoted in and translated by Klaus, op. cit., p. 9. 81. Ingrassia, op. cit., p. 180. 82. Joseph Spence, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Poet. Of his Education; his Methods of Improving himself; how he first engag’d in Poetry; and his great Care in writing. Of each of his par- ticular Poems; of the first Encouragements he met with; and his original Sentiments on several Books, Things, &c. In a letter to a Member of Parliament (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1731), p. 5. 83. Spence, op. cit., p. 6. 84. Spence, op. cit., p. 79. 85. Spence, op. cit., pp. 10–11. 86. Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions (London: W. Bickerton, 1736), pp. xii–xiii. Subsequent parenthetical lines references are to this edition. 87. Letter from Alured Clarke to Mrs Clayton (19 September 1730) quoted in A.T. Thomson, Memoirs of the court and times of King George the 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 201
Second, and his consort Queen Caroline, including numerous private letters of the most celebrated persons of the time addressed to the Viscountess Sundon, mistress of the robes to the queen, and her confidential adviser, exhibiting much of the secret, political, religious, and literary history … Now first pub- lished from the originals by Mrs. Thomson (London: H. Colburn, 1850), p. 190. 88. Letter to Mrs Clayton (19 September 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 202. 89. Letter to Mrs Clayton (8 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 198. 90. Thomson, op. cit., p. 197. 91. Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., pp. 189–190. 92. Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 200. 93. Letter to Mrs Clayton (4 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 195. 94. Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., pp. 200–201. 95. Bridget Keenan, ‘Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 41.3 (2001), pp. 545–560 (546). 96. From the Pegasus in Grub-Street, ‘On the Candidates for the Laurel, An Epigram’, The Grub-Street Journal 45 (12 November 1730). 97. Bavius, ‘An Epigram’, The Grub-Street Journal 46 (19 November 1730). 98. Jonathan Swift, ‘On Stephen Duck the Thresher, and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram, Written in the Year 1730’ in Poems on Several Occasions by J.S, D.D, D. S.P.D. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1735, p. 278, erroneously listed on the Contents page as p. 416. 99. See, for example, The Grub-Street Journal 40 (8 October 1730), and Jonathan Swift, ‘On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram’ in Swift’s Poems, ed Harold Williams, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) I I, p. 521 both quoted in Christmas, op. cit., p. 90. 100. See, for example, William Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 65. 101. Christmas, op. cit., p. 81. 102. Thomson, ‘Summer’, The Seasons, l.342. 103. Herrick, op. cit., pp. 113–115. 104. Bridget Keenan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 37. Joseph Addison, ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ in The Works of Joseph Addison, ed George Washington Greene, 6 vols (Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott, 1888) II, pp. 379–388 (p. 380). Keenan’s note. 105. Keenan, ibid. 202 S. BYRNE
106. Spence, op. cit., p. 14. 107. Keenan sees the ‘dutiful’ invocation of Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’ as part of Duck’s elevation ‘of his plebeian voice with the requisite demonstration of familiarity with garden writing’. Keenan, op. cit., p. 43. 108. Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest (London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1713). 109. In a note to the poem, Duck states that it was composed in 1731, before the alterations were complete. 110. Klaus, op. cit., p. 13. 111. Kirsty Blair, Introduction, Blair and Gorji, op. cit., p. 6. 112. Klaus, op. cit., p. 12. 113. On this subject, see Keenan, ‘Georgic Transformations’. 114. Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 6. 115. See, for example, Robert Dodsley, An Epistle from a Footman in London to the Celebrated Stephen Duck (London: Printed for J. Brindley, 1731); Robert Tatersal, The Bricklayer’s Miscellany, or, Poems on Several Subjects, subtitled ‘By Robert Tatersal, a Poor Country Bricklayer, of Kingston upon Thames, in Allusion to Stephen Duck’ (London: Printed for the Author, 1734), pp. 23–25; and Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck: In Answer to His Late Poem Called ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (London: Printed for the Author: 1739) John Frizzle, ‘An Irish Miller to Mr Stephen Duck’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 (February 1733) 95. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to these editions. 116. The relationship of David Garrick and More is discussed in Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: The Story of a Literary Relationship (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 9–25. 117. See Andrews, op. cit., p. 24. 118. For the Yearsleys’ social status and Ann Yearsley’s early and married life, see Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806 (Athens GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 1–12. Waldron argues that John Yearsley, recorded as of yeoman status, was initially well-to-do. 119. Elizabeth Montagu to Hannah More, 1784, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 368– 369. Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 29. 120. Hannah More to Elizabeth Montagu, 22 October 1784. Quoted in Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, p. 53, Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 31. 121. Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 13 November 1784, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven, 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 203
CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), vol. 31, pp. 220–221. Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 30. 122. Ann Yearsley, Title page, Poems on Several Occasions (London: Thomas Cadell, 1775). 123. Hannah More, ‘To Mrs Montagu’ in Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (London: Thomas Cadell, 1775), p. xi. Parenthetical page and line references are to this edition unless stated otherwise. 124. Ibid. 125. More did not, however, habitually blame drunkenness or depravity among the labouring classes for their poverty, but in her letters refers to high rents, low pay, crop failures, and middlemen driving up food prices. See Jane Nardin, ‘Hannah More and the Problem of Poverty’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Fall 2001), pp. 267–284 (272–274). 126. Yearsley, op. cit., p. vii. 127. Yearsley, op. cit., p. vi. Landry notes that the subject of this pastoral work would have been deemed appropriate for the milkwoman, but that More would have assumed it to be inaccessible to Yearsley, even in English. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-class Women’s Poetry in Britain 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 129. 128. Waldron notes that even during Yearsley’s lifetime Clifton was becoming a suburb of Bristol. Op. cit., p. 1. 129. Yearsley, ‘On Mrs Montagu’, op. cit., pp. 104–105. 130. Keegan discusses the differing and polyvalent meanings of ‘nature’ during the eighteenth century. See op. cit., pp. 1–2. 131. See Landry, op. cit., pp. 127–128. 132. John Gay, ‘The Hare and Many Friends’, Fables by Mr Gay (London: J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1727), p. 172. 133. Yearsley, ‘Clifton Hill’, op. cit., pp. 107–127 (110). For the ambiguity of ‘prospect’ and the elevated perspective, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) and John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 23–25 and John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 134. Donna Landry sees the consciousness of the poem as feminine, not seek- ing to dominate or exploit the natural world but finding consolation in it, and addressing contemporary sexual politics describing the victimisation of young women of fashion. Landry, op. cit., p. 131. 135. In ‘On Mrs Montagu’ a gloss to Lactilla is provided: ‘The Author’. 204 S. BYRNE
136. Richard Samuel, ‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo’ oil on canvas (1778). National Portrait Gallery NPG 4905. 137. Wilson Lowry, line engraving after portrait by an unknown artist (1787). National Portrait Gallery NPG D8853. In an oval frame surrounded by roses and surmounted by ribbons, Yearsley is shown in three-quarter pro- file bust-length. She wears a voluminously sleeved gown with a fichu and a large hat with a wreath of roses over a lace cap. Sarah Shiells’s portrait shows Yearsley seated at a table covered with a tablecloth and holding an inkstand, on a good-quality, possibly Chippendale chair, writing in a book. She wears a large pleated mob cap with a ribbon, a heavy fichu, and a dark gown and white apron. The under-gown or petticoat can be seen at the cuff of the three-quarter-length sleeve. Her hair, just visible at the side and on one shoulder, is curled and in ringlets. Joseph Grozer, Mezzotint, after Sarah Shiells, National Portrait Gallery, NPG D4452. 138. See Waldron, op. cit., pp. 24–26. 139. Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 4th edn (London G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786), pp. xxvii–xxx. 140. Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 1st edn, p. xxviii. 141. Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 4th edn (London G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786), p. xxv, pp. xxx–xxix. 142. See the Cheap Repository Tracts, some by and most edited by Hannah More, for example, ‘The Lancashire Collier Girl: A True Story’ (London: J. Marshall; and R. White; Bath: S. Hazard, 1795) and ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain in Two Parts (London: J. Marshall and R. White; Bath: S. Hazard, 1795). 143. Landry, op. cit., p. 123. Hannah More, letter to Dr Beadon, Bishop of Bath and Wells (1801), William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More 4 vols (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834) III p. 133. Landry’s note. 144. Nardin argues that though More wrote or edited these prescriptions for keeping the economic and politic system stable, her personal letters show that she had serious reservations about the accuracy of the ideas. Op. cit., p. 279. Other critics disagree, for example, ‘[i]n articulating these con- cepts More expresses to an extraordinary degree the social thinking of her class.’ Mona Scheuermann, ‘Hannah More and the English Poor’ Eighteenth-Century Life (Spring 2001) 25: 2, pp. 237–251 (242). 145. Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 168. 146. For a discussion of the patronage of Wilmer Gossip and his relationship with Yearsley, see Frank Felsenstein, ‘Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage, The Thorp Arch Archive: Part I’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21: 2, The Adoption Issue (Autumn, 2002), pp. 346–392. 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 205
147. Felsenstein gives the example of 17-year-old Eliza Dawson, who energeti- cally raised money for Yearsley’s support. Op. cit., pp. 353–355. 148. Waldron, op. cit., p. 5. 149. Felsenstein, op. cit., p. 385. 150. On the role of the milkwoman, see Waldron, op. cit., p. 14. 151. Felsenstein, op. cit., p. 386. 152. Hannah More quoted in Millicent G. Fawcett, Some Eminent Women of Our Time: Short Biographical Sketches (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 212. 153. Klaus, op. cit., p. 7. 154. Straus states that Dodsley had the assistance of Daniel Defoe in polishing and publishing ‘Servitude’. Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher and Playwright (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), p. 21. 155. Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1996), p. 21. 156. See Solomon, op. cit., p. 25. 157. Solomon, op. cit., p. 26. Robert Dodsley, Dedication, A Muse in Livery, or, The Footman’s Miscellany (London: Printed for the Author, 1732), n.p. 158. Dodsley, Dedication, op. cit., n.p. 159. For a description of Dodsley’s informal apprenticeship, see Solomon, op. cit., pp. 32–33. 160. Solomon, op. cit., p. 6. 161. Michael J. Suarez, ‘Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Ghost of Pope: The Politics of Literary Reputation’ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88 (1 January 1994), pp. 189–206 (192). 162. Suarez notes that Dodsley declined to publish Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Mr Pope (1756) because he could not endorse Warton’s estimate of Pope as a second-rank poet, even though the essay endorses the merit of poets published by Dodsley. Suarez, op. cit., p 194. 163. A Collection of Poems by Several Hands 2nd edn (London: Robert Dodsley, 1748–1749). 164. Suarez, op. cit., p. 190. 165. Suarez, ibid. 166. See Suarez, op. cit., p. 197. 167. Suarez, op. cit., p. 199. 168. Roger Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 169. Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 170. Simon White, Introduction, in Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keenan, eds, Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 17–27 (20). 206 S. BYRNE
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Spence, Joseph, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Poet. Of His Education; His Methods of Improving Himself; How He First engag’d in Poetry; and His Great Care in Writing. Of Each of His Particular Poems; of the First Encouragements He Met with; and His Original Sentiments on Several Books, Things, &c. In a Letter to a Member of Parliament. London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1731. Stott, Anne, Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Straus, Ralph, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher and Playwright. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910. Suarez, Michael J., ‘Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Ghost of Pope: The Politics of Literary Reputation’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88 (1 January 1994), 189–206. Swift, Jonathan, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712. ———, Poems on Several Occasions by J.S, D.D, D. S.P.D. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1735. ———, Swift’s Poems, 3 vols, ed. Harold Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1958) I. Tatersal, Robert, The Bricklayer’s Miscellany, Or, Poems on Several Subjects, Subtitled ‘By Robert Tatersal, a Poor Country Bricklayer, of Kingston Upon Thames, in Allusion to Stephen Duck’. London: Printed for the Author, 1734. The Act for Preventing Abuses in Print Seditious, Treasonable, and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for Regulation of Printing and Printing-Presses (10 June 1662). Thompson, E.P., ‘Education and Experience’, The Fifth Annual Albert Mansbridge Memorial Lecture (1968), in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1997, pp. 7–8. Thomson, James, The Seasons. London: Printed for John Millan, 1730. Van-Hagen, Steve, ‘“But Genius is the Special Gift of God!” The Reclamation of “Natural Genius” in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse’, in A History of Working-Class Literature, eds John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 55–69. Waldron, Mary, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806. Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Waller, Edmund, Poems Written Upon Several Occasions and Several Persons, rev. and expanded ed. London: Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Mosley, 1645. Walpole, Horace, Letter to Hannah More (3 November 1784) in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols, 31. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983, pp. 220–221. 4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 211
West, Richard, ‘Letter to Horace Walpole (12 January 1736)’. in Gray and His Friends: Letters and Relics in Great Part Hitherto Unpublished, ed. D.C. Tovey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890, pp. 88–89. White, Simon, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class and the Romantic, eds Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keenan. Canon. Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006, pp. 17–27. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958); rprnt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Wordsworth, William, ‘Resolution and Independence’, in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Yearsley, Ann, Poems on Several Occasions. London: Thomas Cadell, 1775a. ———, Title Page, Poems on Several Occasions. London: Thomas Cadell, 1775b. ———, Poems on Several Occasions, 4th ed. London G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786. Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition. In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. Dublin: Printed for P. Wilson, 1759. CHAPTER 5
The Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century
Introduction After touching on radical and anti-radical movements in the 1790s, this chapter begins by considering Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) as a plebe- ian poet different in kind from those of the earlier generation, primarily in his relationship to patronage, and as a poet whose work is contrasted with that of his near contemporary, William Wordsworth, in terms of the repre- sentation of the poor. There follows a survey of publishing in the earlier part of the nineteenth century and of poets’ responses to the commerciali- sation of poetry publishing and the power of the buying public. Some class-inflected critical reception of poetry is discussed, particularly in rela- tion to Keats’s poetry and to the significance of Romantic Hellenism in relation to class. This chapter builds on important work in the study of neoclassical and Romantic writing and social class by Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji,1 Brian Goldberg,2 Anne Janowitz,3 and John D. Morillo.4 Revolution and counter-revolution, wars and pamphlet wars, fears of invasion, gagging acts and draconian laws, massacres, a mad king, a prof- ligate regent, and an ambitious emperor; the industrial revolution in full flow and the British Empire at its apogee; the Gordon riots in 1780, pub- lication of The Rights of Man in 1791,5 publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792,6 the Spithead and Nore mutinies in 1797, the Irish rising of 1798, the Despard plot of 1802, Luddite action in 1811–1812, the Ely and Littleport rising and Spa Fields riot of 1816, the
© The Author(s) 2020 213 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_5 214 S. BYRNE
Derbyshire insurrection of 1817, the Peterloo massacre in 1819, the Cato Street conspiracy of 1820 … To say that the poets discussed in this section lived during unsettled times would obviously be an understatement. Though the risings never amounted to a revolution, reports in the press, gossip, and hearsay made them enough of a threat to produce strong counter-measures. Whereas in earlier times speeches and debates were cir- culated clandestinely or semi-clandestinely, by 1803 Commons debates were officially published, in Hansard, from 1828 in theMirror of Parliament, and in The Times. The motions and debates of parliament were themselves now more readily available for public debate, critique, and reaction.7 The publication of radical texts by Paine, Wollstonecraft, Blake, and others had its counter-measure in the publication in the Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications (May 1792) and in works such as Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France,8 the Lambeth Loyalist Declaration (1792), and Jeremy Bentham’s Anarchical Fallacies.9 Radical groups such as the London Corresponding Society,10 the revitalised London Society for Constitutional Information under John Horne Tooke,11 and the Whig Society of the Friends of the People12 were countered by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (known as the Crown and Anchor Society).13 Fear of prosecution may have caused Joseph Johnson to withhold publication of Blake’s The French Revolution and Leigh Hunt to delay publication of Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy until 1832. That poem was to become a rallying call in the middle decades of the century and adopted as an anthem of the Chartists.
‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fall’n on you— Ye are many—they are few’.14
The tendency to equate all strikes, protests, and dissidence with revolu- tionary politics and foreign affiliations can be seen in the title of the leading conservative journal of the period, the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, launched in 1797.15 It was also a period celebrated still for its aesthetic theories and practices. These included a grand revival of interest in Roman and particularly Greek culture and, during times when the Grand Tour and more focused expeditions were possible, an influx of 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 215 remnants of Greek art and architecture. The beginnings of the excava- tions at Pompeii from 1748, the work of Johann Joachim Winkelmann,16 John Lemprière,17 and the founding of the Society of Dilettanti (1734) can all be seen as contributing to a new Hellenism. The latter developed from a raucous drinking and dining club to a major influence on taste, and under James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, authors of Antiquities of Athens (1762–1830) gave ‘art, archaeology, history and philology […] a nucleus around which they could gather, each stimulating interest in the others’.18 As Napoleon fashioned himself in the guise of a Roman emperor, so the ideal vision of English culture moved away from the Augustan model towards the Hellenic. This was not without its problems and contradictions, and Greek mythology and history were interpreted in different ways. Timothy Webb sees these interpretations as providing matter for admiration by both Tories and Whigs, conservatives and pro- gressives: ‘[t]he Greek tradition was used not only as an encouraging pretext for reform but as an endorsement for the status quo’.19 It acted as an inhibiting example to writers and artists and as a ‘liberating possibility’.20
Robert Bloomfield, William Wordsworth, and the Poor The problem of imposed chronological boundaries will be seen in the artificial division which sets Robert Bloomfield apart from the plebeian poets discussed in the chapter preceding this. It is appropriate, however, to exclude Bloomfield from the discussion of the poets so much depen- dent on patronage because he did not write verse encomia to middle- or upper-class patrons who took responsibility for his promotion,21 though he does mention both Capel Lofft and the Grafton family (not by name) in his preface to Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs, and because he was not only of a later generation than Duck and Dodsley but also a different kind of worker and different kind of writer. Lofft edited Bloomfield’s first full- length publication, The Farmer’s Boy, wrote a preface, and managed pub- lication.22 Bloomfield was to say that he knew the work had been published only because he saw it in a bookshop. The preface manages the introduc- tion to the reading public carefully, steering them away from suspicion of radicalism and towards the image of an earnest but unsophisticated rough diamond. 216 S. BYRNE
The popularity of The Farmer’s Boy can be attributed to its apparent lack of radical politics. Its central character, Giles, whose ‘portion’ is ‘labour’ lives ‘in constant, cheerful servitude’, in an idealised agrarian archetype of cyclical seasons that happily conspire with humanity to pro- duce abundant bounty (p. 5). Though Giles is ‘untaught’, he is ‘unrepin- ing’, and finds ‘joy’ in every new duty. This is not neoclassical pastoral, there are no ‘dryads or fauns, or genii, or any other phantoms of foreign extraction’.23 There is, however, a Muse, in Broomfield’s ‘Invocation’ (p. 3). The lack of an obvious coherent political agenda in the poem is seen by Christmas as a strategy for appealing to readers on both sides of various contemporary political debates, including the treatment of ani- mals.24 Christmas argues that the humanitarianism professed in the poem’s description of the practice of docking horses’ tails ‘forges links’ to ‘reform efforts designed to humanize the brutish, immoral (and potentially revo- lutionary) lower classes’.25 Both political factions can find ‘common ideo- logical ground’ in the poem because it refers to the rights of animals, not humanity.26 Cruelty to horses is again described in the ‘Winter’ section of The Farmer’s Boy in an address to ‘Dobbin’ the plough horse which Christmas notes anticipates a parliamentary speech by Lord Erskine in which the exploitation of post-horses is made to characterise the inhu- mane cruelty created by the profit motive.27 This alignment with the humanitarian, anti-cruelty movement is, however, countered by the sub- sequent command to Dobbin to accept his life on the basis that the post- horse’s life and death are worse; he will be worked to death and then become dog meat.
Short-sighted Dobbin! …. thou cans’t only see The trivial hardships that encompass thee: Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose, Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes [….] Then freely bear thy burden to the mill; Obey but one short law,—thy driver’s will. (pp. 86–88)
The closing scene of the Summer section of The Farmer’s Boy, like Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour, depicts a harvest feast. Duck’s poem emphasises the pleasure of the temporary respite from labour and the cruel trick that it makes the harvesters believe that the work is done, whereas they must immediately start on a new task. Bloomfield’s feast depicts the ‘generous Master’ noted in ‘Spring’ as filling his station with ‘grace’, here exhibiting 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 217 the hospitality by which he is ‘endear’d’. Custom unites the master with ‘all that clear’d the crop, or till’d the ground’ (p. 44) the common cause and custom effacing differences of rank. The poem reflects, however, that this was the past, when ‘once a year, Distinction low’rs its crest’ (p. 45). That laudable old custom in which a reaper would honour the host, the landowning farmer, as both master and friend, has been replaced by new ‘tyrant customs’ which ‘violate the feel- ings of the poor’ (p. 46). The enemies are wealth, refinement, and fashion, which have disrupted the ‘social plan’ of unity that ‘rank to rank cements, as man to man’, leaving a ‘widening distance’ between workers and mas- ters when refinement forces the farmer to give up the cherished old custom. The poem introduces a new character, not happily servile Giles but someone who mourns the old ways, and who speaks, responding perhaps to Duck’s ‘content’:
Can my sons share from this paternal hand The profits with the labours of the land? No; though indulgent Heaven its blessing deigns, Where’s the small farm to suit my scanty means? Content, the poet sings, with us resides In lonely cots like mine the damsel hides; And will he then in raptur’d visions tell That sweet Content with Want can ever dwell? (p. 47)
This dissenting voice is not permitted to go too far into a radical critique of social system, however, but returns to a nostalgic regret for unity of rural life which the feast enacts but with ‘substance gone’ (p. 48). This is not a radical call to revolution, however, but a reference to an imaginary organic community which modern life has spoiled.
For oft the Farmer, ere his heart approves, Yields up the custom that he dearly loves: Refinement forces on him like a tide; Bold innovations on its current ride, That bear no peace beneath their shewy dress, Nor add one tittle to his happiness.
The ‘good old Master’ would shake his labourers’ hands and the poor bless his honoured name (p. 49) The mourner’s ‘cot’ will be free of both 218 S. BYRNE want and ‘guilty murmurs’, and if labour has its ‘due’, the mourner will be at peace and will not ‘repine’. A postscript to Bloomfield’s preface to his first collection notes the happy event of the advent of peace in October 1801 and is followed by a poem, ‘Peace’.28 This loudly trumpets its patriotism and loyalty, to the throne and to the economic system:
Boast, Britain, of thy glorious Guests; Peace, Wealth, and Commerce, all thine own: (p. xi) The next lines are somewhat ambiguous: Still on contented Labour rests The basis of a lasting Throne.
This could emphasise the continuity of the state and the contentedness of the workforce; it could warn that were the labourers not content, the throne would be shaky. Poverty is just one among a number of personified and apostrophised abstractions, in the following lines of equal kind to wealth and, presumably, God.
Shout, Poverty! ‘tis Heaven that saves; Protected Wealth, the chorus raise: Ruler of War, of Winds, and Waves, Accept a prostrate Nation’s praise. Returning to the theme of cheerful servility, the poem commands: Let every patriot bosom glow. Beauty, resume thy wonted smile, And, Poverty, thy cheerful brow.
The alienation described by Richard Hoggart in relation to the twentieth- century scholarship boy is described by Bloomfield when he is estranged from his home landscape during a stay at the Duke of Grafton’s estate in Northamptonshire and from working men by his enforced hiatus from manual occupation. At Wakefield Lodge, Bloomfield was in Whittlebury Forest, once part of the royal manor of Greens Norton, imbued with all the social tensions of forest law. He writes that he believed the neighbours and workmen looked at him ‘as an idle fellow’ because he had ‘nothing to do but to read, look at them, and their country and concerns’. The work- ers have become ‘them’ and the countryside and concerns of labour are theirs, not his. His poem ‘Lines Occasioned by a Visit to Whittlebury Forest in August 1800’,29 subtitled ‘Addressed to my Children’, unlike the 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 219 narrative rural tales, is written in the first person and is a largely conven- tional poem which apostrophises the genius of the place. Whereas Giles and the mourning man are part of an agrarian community and work in amongst the crops and animals, the ‘I’ of this poem takes the locodescrip- tive poet’s elevated perspective.
Sweet, from the heights of thy domain! When the grey ev’ning shadow fades, To view the gleaming Village Spire Midst distance groves unknown to me; Groves, that grown bright in borrow’d fire, Bow o’er the peopl’d Vales to thee! (p. 84)
Like Pope in his poem on Windsor Forest and Duck in his on Richmond, Bloomfield uses a seemingly natural but actually managed landscape to make a political point. Very little happens; Bloomfield’s speaker walks a while and then sits down and thinks of his children. As he walks, however, he notices some tree trunks on the ground, and his imagination takes him to the sea, because these are oaks,
Whose trunks (with bark no longer sheath’d) Had reach’d their full meridian strength Before your Father’s Father breath’d! (p. 83)
These oaks will make ships that will brave storms and bring victory, their longevity and durability consonant with their strength to protect Britain, just as the forest canopy has protected the forest foliage during a storm. The message to the children is to trust the pillars that for genera- tions have been in place, propping up the social system. E.P. Thompson finds a point of change between the work of Bloomfield and his near contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850). He sees Bloomfield’s lines on the plight of the poor as an illustration of the persistent strength of the cultural framework that makes distinction between cultures, since The Farmer’s Boy and other poems call upon the conscience and charity of the rich but in no way challenge the frame of paternalism within which the writers and their subjects are subordinate. In contrast, Wordsworth is seen as engaging with the rural poor, and inviting a response from his readers, closing ‘the cold distance’ between the two cultures through intensity of feeling and empathy. Wordsworth’s poetic 220 S. BYRNE personae are said not to visit the poor like voyeurs but to find ‘the experi- ence […] real and central’.30 Some of the Lyrical Ballads poems enter into the lives of the poor in that the language is simple and the stories are those of Goody Blake or Johnny Foy. Indeed, Charles Burney’s criticism of the then anonymously published collection suggests that for an educated poet capable of complex lyricism to assume the simple language and narrate the simple stories of the poor was suspiciously close Jacobinism.31 Other poems in the collection, however, seem to reinforce the sense of distance between the narrator-interlocutor and the peasants to whom he speaks. Thompson finds that Book XII of thePrelude turns around the cultural table so that the reader and the narrator are subordinate to the chance-met itinerant walkers. This is because the ‘lonely roads’ on which the narrator meets the poor enable him daily to read of ‘the passions of mankind’, and afford insights into ‘the depths of human souls’, whilst the ‘vulgar eyes’ of privilege see the poor as having no depth. The reader, then, vicariously walks and talks with the wayfarers on roads where ‘real feeling and just sense’ are to be found, and is invited to condemn the ‘levity and vulgarity of the polite’.32 This section of the Prelude, as elsewhere in Wordsworth’s work, privileges feeling, in terms of authenticity and depth, which is not the same as culture. Whilst this may be ‘an affirmation of the worth of the common man’,33 it is also, and more so, an affirmation of the worth of the poet figure, who is distinguished from the synecdochal vulgar eyes by vir- tue of his ability to empathise with and feel sympathy for the poor in much the same way as the poet figure has learned to read a moral lesson in nature’s book. The strength of the poet figure’s sensibility is the centre of the lines, and the wayfaring poor are represented homogeneously and metonymically, and in relation to him (‘the lonely roads/Were schools to me’). Unlike ‘Society’, which has ‘parted man from man’, the narrator is able to look beyond outward marks of rank into ‘the universal human heart’. The emphasis is on the worth of the spirit or soul, the interior life or sensibilities. Thompson asserts that Wordsworth resists the temptation to produce effete pastoral idealisation, or variants of the holy peasant, but although the Prelude acknowledges that the poor may not be perfect, it does idealise the working man, finding in the ‘rudest’.
Self-sacrifice the firmest, generous love and continence of mind, and sense of right Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 221
From the mouths of ‘lowly men and of obscure’, the narrator hears ‘A tale of honour’. If, as Thompson asserts, the worth of the common man ‘lay in moral and spiritual attributes, developed through experiences of labour, suffering, and through primary human relationships’, then alleviation of suffering and toil would presumably result in dilution of that goodness and worth. Thompson notes that Wordsworth was ‘actively distrustful of formal education which might inhibit or divert experiential growth’.34 This is not the social égalité with which Thompson identifies Wordsworth but a philosophy which rates highly moral worth gleaned from experience and instinct, the ‘elementary’ feelings of the rural poor untainted by learned values, and fears the dilution of that moral worth through contact with a commercial, self-centred, materialistic society.35 The moral function of Wordsworth’s poetry of affect and empathy is set out in a letter which asserts that it is right to evoke ‘such feelings as all men do sympathise with’ but that it is also ‘highly desirable to add to these oth- ers, such as all men may sympathise with’. This is desirable not only because sympathy may be produced for the objects of the poem, such as the poor, but also for the benefit of the reader. The ‘other’ feelings should be ‘such as there is reason to believe they would be better and more moral beings if they did sympathise with’.36 This allows for the poetic presenta- tion of subjects outside the immediate experience and knowledge of the reader and the inculcation of sympathy for those subjects, in many cases the lower-class mendicant, wandering, or labouring poor whom Wordsworth assumes will be alien to his readers. It does not emphasise the similarities between rich and poor as much later nineteenth-century social problem fiction does. Rather than demand on behalf of the leech-gatherer or pedlar, ‘Am I not a man like you?’, it suggests that in many ways the rural poor are better than the urban rich, a closer relation of prelapsarian humanity. Wordsworth’s pedlar has a heart ‘open and by nature tuned’. The ‘constant disposition of his thoughts’ to ‘sympathy with man’ makes him ‘alive/To all that was enjoyed’ […] and all that was endured.37 The preface to the Lyrical Ballads sets out the case for choosing inci- dents from ‘[L]ow and rustic life’ because,
in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.38 222 S. BYRNE
The poor, then, have fundamental feelings without sophistry, affecta- tion, or disingenuousness, which are expressed without social vanity, and the occupations of rural life ‘germinate’ rural manners, which are more easy to understand. In this condition, ‘the passions of men are incorpo- rated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. Whilst the pref- ace deplores poets who ‘separate themselves from the sympathies of men’, and uses the inclusive plural pronoun ‘our’ in reference to feelings, it separates the ‘I’ from ‘incidents and situations from common life’, ‘[l]ow and rustic life’, ‘these men’, and ‘such men’, and therefore ‘their rank in society’.39 These unsophisticated beings provide a series of ur- men whose actions more clearly delineate ‘the primary laws of our nature’, enabling the poet to show these ‘chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’.40 Further, Statesmen who would sweep away such ‘nuisances’ as the old Cumberland beggar are informed that these have a function; on those who sympathise with them and offer charity, they confer a warm sense of having done good and enable them to reflect on their own more comfortable and happy circumstances.
the Villagers in him Behold a record with together binds Past deeds and offices of charity Else unremembered and so keeps alive The kindly mood (ll. 80–84) More, he allows even ‘the poorest poor’ to know and feel that they have been The fathers and the dealers out Of some small blessings (ll. 140–143)
The poem thus records the worth of the Cumberland beggar and demands that such as he be not deemed a ‘burden of the earth’ but acknowledged as part of the ‘life and soul to every mode of being/ Inseparably linked’ (ll. 70–78). The lexis describing these whom Nature’s law unites with the rest of humankind, however, focuses on their lowness and ugliness, as though creation rather than poverty had bent and weathered the beggar.
the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious. (ll. 74–76) 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 223
Like many of the rural characters in the poems, the old beggar is nameless and almost featureless, described mainly through his relationship to and effect on the poetic persona and others. The old leech-gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’ is even less solidly specified. Though the wandering poet puts a question and notes the solemn, lofty form of the reply, the old man’s words almost immediately cease to have meaning in themselves, and he himself dissolves into an insubstantial dream:
But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide: And the whole Body of the man did seem Like one whom I had met with in a dream; (ll. 114–117)
What he has dissolved into is symbol; of importance only as he relates to the poet persona, his very existence in that pond at that moment is for the poet’s benefit, and once significant in this way, his pronoun gains a capi- tal letter.
like a Man from some far region sent; To give me human strength, and strong admonishment. (ll. 118–119)
Again the poet’s attention wanders, his interior state and reflections being now more important than the exterior phenomenon which have stimu- lated them.
While I these thoughts within myself pursued, He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed. (ll. 139–140)
The poet persona appears to find a commonality with the leech-gatherer, the old Cumberland beggar, and the solitary reaper in the poem of that name on the basis of their all being alone, but their solitude exists to reflect his own. His wanderings do not show him only the ground under his feet, like the old beggar’s, nor only the muddy water, like the leech- gatherer’s, nor the corn, like the reaper’s. He, the artist of sublimity, notices the beauties of nature (though Wordsworth represents it mostly scantily and generically), hearing the stock dove, jay, magpie, and skylark, and seeing the hare (ll. 5–30), whereas hardship and labour (and the reap- er’s work song) have deadened the senses of the poor and curtailed their sensuous awareness. 224 S. BYRNE
Again a poor man proves his worth by the benefit he gives to someone better off, in this case an example of strength of mind, and again we are reminded that the poor are not so different and shouldn’t be excluded from humanity. Yet they are different. The poet is amazed to find a firm mind in a decrepit shape (ll. 144–145). His melancholy has been in part a fear of the madness in which some poets have ended their lives, but whereas poet-wanders are described in terms of spirit and sublimity and quick movement, the leech-gatherer is stolid, unmoving, and weightily rock-like.
Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless soul that perished in its pride; Of Him, who walked in glory and in joy Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side: By our own spirits are we deified. (ll. 43–47)
The leech-gatherer seems like a huge stone ‘on the bald top of an emi- nence’ and like
a Sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself. (ll. 64–70)
In a much later letter to Coleridge, Wordsworth sets out an organisational scheme for his collection. One category of poems should consist
chiefly of objects most interesting to the mind not only by its personal feel- ings or a strong appeal to the instincts of natural affections, but to be inter- esting to a meditative and imaginative mind either from the moral importance of the pictures or from the employment they give to the understanding affected through the imagination and to the higher faculties.41
The opposition here between feelings and instincts of natural affections and the meditative and imaginative mind is significant. The ‘pictures’, scenes of privation, provide employment—are worked on—by the under- standing, which is affected by imagination and the ‘higher’ faculties. Full understanding, empathy, or identification is not to be expected, but through the medium of the teacher poet’s images, readers might experi- ence moments of insight and sympathy which had been deadened by the 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 225 accretions of modern life. The villagers’ hearts in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, by
lapse of years, And that half-wisdom half-experience gives Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign To selfishness and cold oblivion cares. (ll. 91–94) are reminded of past charity and awakened to a kindly mood. This enter- prise is in harmony with contemporary radical politics which foresee revo- lutions creating a world reborn, without the old injustices based on divisions. The Prelude recalls the mood of France on the eve of the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, a time when
Europe was rejoiced, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again. […] it was our lot To land at Calais on the very eve Of that great federal Day; and there we saw, In a mean City, and among a few, How bright a face is worn when joy of one is joy of tens of millions. (ll. 352–360)42
Hazlitt refers to ‘the bright dream of our youth’ when ‘we’ imagined ‘that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty’ and ‘a new and golden era’.43 Later lines of the Prelude recall the time when the speaker believed that
a benignant spirit was abroad Which might not be withstood, that poverty Abject as this would in a little time be no more. (IX, ll. 519–522)
This spirit would cease to thwart nature’s plan to nourish all—‘to recom- pense/The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil’ (ll. 23–24), and the speaker would see
[a]ll institutes for ever blotted out That legalised exclusion, empty pomp Abolished sensual state and cruel power (ll. 25–27) 226 S. BYRNE
So that, finally, the ‘crown of all’ would be
the people having a strong hand In framing their own laws; when better days To all mankind. (ll. 29–31)
The later sonnet ‘On the Late General Fast, 1832’, describes ‘the People’ as having ‘flinty hearts’ which have been softened by ‘penitential sorrow’, their sufferings. The poem’s hope is that just as they prayed for help dur- ing the cholera outbreak, ‘Chastised by self-abasement more profound’ they will now seek defence from good against the far more dangerous ‘pestilence’ of revolution. Wordsworth’s doctrine of one humanity united in feeling is not unequivocally and homogeneously expressed in his or other Romantic writings, whose contradictions and faultlines suggest ambivalence and unease about both the lower classes and the burgeoning book- buying public.
Poetry, the Public, and the Market Cheaper, faster print and increased literacy meant wider,44 faster dissemi- nation of information. Handbills, cheap or free tracts, and ballads were much more sophisticated than during the Civil War and Restoration and, now in competition with detailed, complex, satirical cartoons, had to be pithy and accessible to reach a mass audience. The fear of the power of rapid print circulation to lead to rapid and unwanted social change is visi- ble, of course, in print; in periodicals such as Anti-Cobbett, or The Weekly Patriotic Register (from 1817), the White Dwarf (1817–1818), and Shadgett’s Weekly Review, of Cobbett, Wooler, Sherwin, and Other Democratical and Infidel Writers (1818–1819), as well as in the literary criticism of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (from 1817) and the Quarterly Review (from 1809), from printed sermons, moral and improv- ing novels, essays, works of history, philosophy, and theology, and in works which blended theology, morality, and patriotism in its messages, such as the Established Church journal The British Critic (1793). This is not to suggest a simple conservative/radical paradigm; any reading of, for exam- ple, Reflections on the Revolution in France will show that arguments are more nuanced and positions more complex than that, but it is possible to see an oppositional and both prophylactic and reactionary programme 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 227 designed to discredit French radicalism, discourage British dissent and sedition, and promote a settled working class. The Anti-Levelling Songster included anti-Napoleon, anti-French, and anti-radical poems in its pages, in its second issue featuring ‘Leis Baboon and John Bull’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘The Sturdy Reformer’, which aligns contemporary reform with regicide, rape of royalty, the end of order and justice, and turning the world ‘topsy- turvy’,45 ‘God Save the King!’ and The Loyal Briton’. The latter begins:
Let wicked Paineites rail ‘gainst Kings Gainst governments and laws, Ne’re heed such base malicious things, Nor er’er espouse their cause, But strive their wicked schemes to foil. (ll. 1–6)
And has a refrain:
Let us be loyal to our king, Obedient to the laws, And heaven with influence benign Will aid the glorious cause. (ll. 9–12)46
The increase in printed material responded to demand as well as to technological and logistic capacities. The concept of a print-consuming paying public, a market, became a subject of interest and anxiety and a matter of status. Patronage might entail servility and subjection to the caprice of one or a few patrons, but gave the writer a direct relationship with a circle of readers whose criticism might be accepted either from financial prudence or voluntarily. The poet not dependent on patronage might gain a higher social status, but a writer desirous of success in the market is liable to the caprice of many more, unknown, people and to the operations of an impersonal institution.47 The ambivalently radical Hazlitt expresses himself happy to ‘go along with’ Wordsworth whilst the poet and his feelings about nature are the subjects of the poems, but takes leave of the poet when Wordsworth makes ‘pedlars and ploughmen his heroes and the interpreters of his sentiments’. For Hazlitt, this is ‘getting into low company, and company, besides, that we do not like’.48 He objects to Wordsworth’s representation of the rural poor on the basis that rural life is so wretched and difficult that country people are hardened, stupid, and selfish, and hate one another and every- 228 S. BYRNE one else: ‘If you are poor you are despised; if you are rich, you are feared and hated’. His own dislike extends to the middle and professional classes: ‘[t]he apothecary annoys you with his complaisance, the parson with his superciliousness’.49 Following a list of all the pleasures and occupations which the countryside does not offer, Hazlitt asserts the results of this deprivation:
Vanity and luxury are the civilizers of the world, and sweeteners of human life. Without objects either of pleasure or action, it grows crabbed; the mind becomes stagnant, the affections callous, and the eye dull. Man left to himself soon degenerates into a very disagreeable person. Ignorance is always bad enough; but rustic ignorance is intolerable.50
The objection, then, is not only to the representation of plebeian charac- ters in poetry but also to the literary judgements of those who don’t have luxuries and objects of pleasure. In ‘An Aristocracy of Letters’ (discussed later), he complains about the route to critical acclaim and fame conferred by a title, but his republicanism is neither universal benevolence nor revo- lutionary egalitarianism. His misanthropic description of the segment of the public whom he categorises as non-reading and outwith civilised cul- ture is elsewhere extended to the common people generally. Whilst in ‘The Periodical Press’ arguing for the reading public as a bet- ter arbiter of excellence than the average reviewer, whom he blames for the temporary fashions of modern writing,51 in ‘Fine Arts’, Hazlitt asserts that the highest efforts of genius in any art cannot be understood by ‘man- kind in general’.
[T]here are numberless beauties and truths which lie far beyond their com- prehension. […] Common sense, which has been sometimes appealed to as the criterion of taste, is nothing but the common capacity, applied to com- mon facts and feelings. … To suppose that it can really appreciate the excel- lence of works of high art, is as absurd as to suppose that it could produce them.52
‘Common’ here becomes pejorative and higher feelings and capacities are uncommon. Not only the rural poor who have not been exposed to edu- cation and the products of high culture but also the wider public are excluded from matters of taste, and the more popular the work, the less tasteful it must be. ‘Public taste is necessarily vitiated, in proportion as it is 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 229 public; it is lowered with every infusion it receives of common opinion. The greater the number of judges, the less capable must they be of judging.’ In a lecture on Thomson and Cowper, Hazlitt finds the reason for Thomson’s popularity in his accessibility, and approvingly quotes the judgement that a shabby soiled copy of The Seasons found on the window seat of a country ale-house is ‘true fame’.53 Comparing the products of more recent poets to those of an earlier period, however, Hazlitt decries Bloomfield’s muse as ‘not only rustic but menial’, and argues that original genius may be insufficient to the production of effective new poetry with- out education manners, passions, or religious beliefs.54 Without those passions, poetry becomes ‘effeminate’ versions of past works and a slave to public preference. ‘The public taste hangs like a millstone around the neck of all original genius that does not conform to established and exclusive models’.55 In another essay, Hazlitt refers to ‘wits’ who are taken up and thrown aside, caressed, and insulted, ‘subject to all the caprice, the malice, and fulsome advances of that great keeper—the Public’.56 Wordsworth rejects the ‘senseless iteration’ of the term ‘popular’ to new works of poetry ‘as if there were no test of excellence in this first of the fine arts but that all men should run after its productions, as if urged by an appetite, or constrained by a spell!’57 Poetry which gains instant attention is audacious and extravagant or superficial, whereas
in everything which is to send the soul into herself, to be admonished of her weakness, or to be made conscious of her power;—wherever life and nature are described as operated upon by the creative or abstracting virtue of the imagination; wherever the instinctive wisdom of antiquity and her heroic passions uniting, in the heart of the poet, with the meditative wisdom of later ages, have produced that accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past and a prophetic enunciation of the remot- est future.
Acclaim will be slow to follow: ‘there, the poet must reconcile himself for a season to few and scattered hearers’. Only for a season, however. Whilst the majority will be attracted to the meretricious, the few true readers will multiply year by year. Although ‘vicious’ poetry has always attracted more attention and been read more than ‘good’, and perhaps always will,
the object of present admiration vanishes, being supplanted by some other as easily produced; which, though no better, brings with it at least the irrita- 230 S. BYRNE
tion of novelty,—with adaptation, more or less skilful, to the changing humours of the majority of those who are most at leisure to regard poetical works when they first solicit their attention.
Here, Wordsworth defends himself against an imagined charge of dispar- aging the common reader by distinguishing between the public and the people. This distinction may be important for a reading of his own poems.
Is it the result of the whole, that, in the opinion of the Writer, the judge- ment of the People is not to be respected? The thought is most injurious; and, could the charge be brought against him, he would repel it with indig- nation. The People have already been justified, and their eulogium pro- nounced by implication, when it was said, above—that, of good poetry, the individual, as well as the species, survives. And how does it survive but through the People? What preserves it but their intellect and their wisdom?
—Past and future, are the wings On whose support, harmoniously conjoined, Moves the great Spirit of human knowledge—
He asserts that the voice issuing from that spirit is the vox populi ‘which the Deity inspires’, not to be confused with local, even national, acclama- tion or ‘transitory—though years-long’ outcry. A more lamentable error would be the belief that the ‘clamour’ of the loud minority represents the people.
Towards the Public, the Writer hopes that he feels as much deference as it is entitled to: but to the People, philosophically characterised, and to the embodied spirit of their knowledge, so far as it exists and moves, at the pres- ent, faithfully supported by its two wings, the past and the future, his devout respect, his reverence, is due.58
This distinction between the market and an ideal standard of excellence, for Williams, is the root of the idea of culture, ‘a court of appeal in which real values were determined, usually in opposition to the “factitious” val- ues thrown up by the market and similar operations of society’.59 Culture becomes a bulwark against the forces of commerce and the specialisation of the artist which, Williams asserts, ‘followed inevitably from the institu- tion of commercial publishing’. It is a source of resistance to the classifica- 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 231 tion of literature as a trade and to the measure of literary success in terms of sales. Commerce allows the mob rather than the cultured and intellec- tual to determine value by spending, but culture and intellect determine true worth. This ‘vile evil’ of literature’s having become a trade is lamented in Sir Egerton Brydges’ autobiography.
Nothing has gone so far to nurture a corrupt taste, and to give the unintel- lectual power over the intellectual. Merit is now universally esteemed by the multitude of readers that an author can attract. […] Will the uncultivated mind admire what delights the cultivated?’60
Thomas Moore writes of the ‘lowering of standards that must necessarily arise from the extending of the circle of judges’, from letting ‘the mob’ become arbiters, ‘particularly at a period when the market is such an object to authors’.61 When works by Lord Byron were selling in the thousands, and their payments for copyright were in the thousands of pounds, and when narrative fiction was outselling poetry, Wordsworth was paid £80 for the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads, a sign of public taste which, according to Lucy Newlyn, caused ‘a certain bitterness to creep into the Lake Poets’ response to the British reading-public’.62 Newlyn characterises the enterprise of Wordsworth and Coleridge as seeking to form public taste rather than to pander to it,63 an enterprise explicitly set out by Wordsworth in 1815: ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be’.64 Williams notes a resistance to the sense of the artist as subject to market forces in a simultaneous emphasis on both the special nature of ‘art- activity’ as a means to ‘imaginative truth’ and on the artist as a special kind of person. This image is not or is not only a counter-measure by the artist.
It is also (and this has been of the greatest subsequent importance) an emphasis on the embodiment in art of certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying.65
Though ‘professional protest’ occurred, for Williams, the larger issue is ‘the opposition on general human ground’ to the perceived changes in society. The most explicit separation of poetry from commerce in Romantic writing comes in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. Shelley argues that the dispro- 232 S. BYRNE portionate cultivation of the ‘mechanical arts’ and the sciences which have enlarged human activity, as opposed to the creative faculties, has led to the abuse of ‘all invention’, and the enslavement of workers. He states that poetry and ‘the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world’. Poetry not only creates new forms of knowledge and pleasure but also engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good.’ It is therefore particu- larly desirable to cultivate poetry when, ‘from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature’.66 If art, and specifically poetry, are special, it follows that the artist or poet as vehicle of the great truths that poetry reveals is special. Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, in addition to contributing to the idea of native genius, emphasises the specialness of the artist and the spe- cial nature of artistic creation, opposing the discourse of industry to that of organic genius.
An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.
This higher status accorded the organically grown (cultivated) original work and lower accorded to the mechanically manufactured parallels the greater status of ownership of a unique rather than a mass-produced arte- fact. It follows that the possessor of the vital root of artistic genius who can grow an original, resisting the lure of popularity and pecuniary advantage of mechanical reproduction, must be of a purer nature and that this higher calling must have a special function and special status. Wordsworth makes a similar hierarchical distinction between readers, the active and the passive, a distinction which hinges on the term ‘taste’. Those who speak of poetry ‘as a matter of amusement and idle pleasure’, who speak of ‘a taste for poetry’ as they might ‘a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry’,67 are passive. Taste is a metaphor ‘taken from a pas- sive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive—to intellectual acts and operations’. Taste, then, a pas- sive reception, is inadequate to receive ‘the profound and the exquisite in 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 233 feeling, the lofty and universal in thought and imagination’ which are not ‘objects of a faculty which could ever without a sinking in the spirit of Nations have been designated by the metaphor Taste’. The reading must be active and associative: ‘without the exertion of a cooperating power in the mind of the Reader, there can be no adequate sympathy with either of these emotions: without this auxiliary impulse, elevated or profound pas- sion cannot exist’.68 The possession of taste is adequate to commodified art, but a more active relationship is required for the higher form, the poetry of ‘general and operative’ truth which is ‘carried alive into the heart by passion’.69 The conclusion to the first book of The Recluse, of which The Excursion was to be a part, included in the 1814 preface to The Excursion, quotes from Paradise Lost: ‘fit audience let me find though few!’70 This consider- ably reduces the audience envisaged in the prose section of the preface as ‘the Public’ and in the poem as ‘Man’.71 Paradise Lost is cited several times, suggesting that The Recluse addresses a similarly high theme, identi- fied in the preface as Man, Nature, and Society, and specifically in the poem, Man and Mind. It also alludes to Milton as a poet who did not earn a living from sales of his work, a revered and canonical writer whose repu- tation has grown among successive generations through appreciation and judicious praise. Hazlitt takes this further, referring to Milton’s reputation as ‘owing to the judgement of a few persons in every successive period, accumulating in his favour, and overpowering by its weight the public indifference’.72 For Hazlitt, the approval of the common people is no guarantee of artistic value, and whilst the purchases of many establish fame, few people have the natural taste and judgement to be arbiters of artistic excellence. Although the number of candidates for fame, and pre- tenders to criticism, is ‘increased beyond all proportion […] the quantity of genius and feeling remains the same’, and ‘the man of genius is lost in the crowd of competitors who would never have become such but from encouragement and example’.73 Only a few persons are intended by nature to be judges, but their opinion is ‘drowned in the noisy suffrages of shal- low smatterers in taste’. However much the principle of universal suffrage should be applied to government, for Hazlitt, it does not apply to taste,
which can only be decided on by the most refined understandings. The highest efforts of genius, in every walk of life, can never be properly under- stood by the generality of mankind. There are numberless beauties and truths which lie beyond their comprehension [….] It may be objected that 234 S. BYRNE
the public taste is capable of gradual improvement because, in the end, the public do justice to works of greatest merit. This is a mistake.74
In this view, Wordsworth could not educate and mould a readership into the ideal of real discrimination and evaluation unless nature had predis- posed them to have refinement and sensibility. Conversely, he suggests that however much original inspiration the great poet might possess, he will have applied himself industriously to learning in order to foster innate talent and the inspiration of the Muse. The ‘growth of a poet’s mind is a process in which credentials are earned—the poet is made, and perhaps self-made, as well as he is born’.75 The Prelude emphasises the equivalence of ‘talents and successful industry’ in the section on the narrator’s univer- sity years (IX ll. 230–236). His writing about books, book-buyers, and the market suggests an anxiety about the incompatibility of the need to par- ticipate in getting and spending at a time when patronage was unlikely to provide it, with concomitant need to write for a non-ideal market, and the image of a bard dedicated to higher truths and the universal heart. In a letter to Sara Hutchinson about ‘Salisbury Plain’, Wordsworth writes, ‘I certainly should not publish it unless I hoped to derive from it some pecu- niary recompense’.76 That recompense was insufficient, but having accepted the post of collector of stamps, he was subject to several satirical digs by Hazlitt, who seems to suggest the incompatibility of salary and poetry. He finds the Lake Poets ‘nestling under their laurels in the stye of Corruption […] in lazy sinecures’77; in 1818, he states that ‘[t]he Muses and the Excise […] never agreed well together […] till they were unac- countably reconciled on Rydal Mount. He must know (no man better) the distraction created by the opposite calls of business and of fancy’.78 This may have stung not because Wordsworth ever represented himself as a gentleman of leisure who didn’t need to earn money from his writing, or who would be soiled by pecuniary reward for his muse, but because of a fine distinction between the social classes of occupations. If writing poetry is considered as the equivalent of being a learned clergyman, or academic, or lawyer, that is, of entailing intellectual but not manual labour, then the poet may be of the higher middling sort. The rank of a poet, then, is one whose profession requires and receives remuneration but a gentlemanly profession.79 Goldberg concludes that ‘[d]espite moments of high argu- ment which insist that the inspired poet transcends normal economic and cultural arrangements, Wordsworth’s vocational theorizing, publicly artic- ulated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, aligns the poet with the new 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 235 model of professionalism’.80 The Prelude again by juxtaposition empha- sises that the education required for entry to the professions is that of a gentleman.
of one community— Scholars and gentlemen. (IX ll. 332–333)
Cambridge is represented as a place
where wealth and titles were in less esteem Than talents and successful industry. (IX ll. 335–336)
That Wordsworth’s academic industry and/or talent was not sufficient for him to take up a fellowship perhaps influenced the later emphasis on the high status of the profession he did embrace.81 Wordsworth argues that hereditary rank and privilege will inevitably impede the progress of human improvement82 and The Prelude echoes the younger Wordsworth’s revolutionary principles and distaste for social rank based on birth or wealth.
How books mislead us—looking for their fame To judgements of the wealthy few, who see By artificial lights—how they debase The many for the pleasure of those few. Effectively level down the truth To certain general notions for the sake Of being understood at once, or else Through want of better knowledge in the men Who frame them, flattering thus our self-conceit With pictures that arbitrarily set forth The differences, the outside marks by which Society has parted man from man Neglectful of the universal heart.
Yet, the class chosen by the poet as superior, in having the most unaffected language, and the purest motivations and emotional responses, and being closest to nature are referred to as ‘low’. A letter from Wordsworth to John Wilson defending the Lyrical Ballads from the charge of not being ‘pleasing’ asks ‘please whom or what?’ and replies ‘human nature as it has been and ever will be’.83 That universal and everlasting common nature 236 S. BYRNE can be found by stripping our hearts naked and by looking ‘out of our- selves towards men who lead the simplest lives’. The letter seems to insist on recognition of the humanity of the lower classes but at the same time distinguishes the author and the recipient as part of a different order from which they look out to the simple rustics. Though it is a ‘sad mistake’ to assume that human nature is that of the narrow range of people with whom one associates, those who make that mistake are people ‘in our rank of life’.
Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, pro- fessional men, ladies, persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine paper. These persons are, it is true, a part of human nature, but we err lamentably if we suppose them to be fair representatives of the vast mass of human existence.
Wordsworth asserts that few ‘ever consider books but with reference to their power of pleasing these persons and men of a higher rank’ and few ‘descend lower among cottages and fields and among children’, he himself being an exception, but the inclusive plural first-person pronoun firmly links Wordsworth and Wilson but excludes those who cannot afford half a guinea for a book and into whose sphere he has descended. The Cumberland beggar with whom the poet’s persona empathised so strongly through the unifying force of the universal human heart is not the audience for the poetry, but the approval of the actual middle-class book- buying public is not to be taken as a sign of literary value:
Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word, popular, applied to new works in Poetry, as if there were no test of excellence in this first of the fine arts but that all Men should run after its productions, as if urged by an appe- tite, or constrained by a spell! The qualities of writing best fitted for eager reception are either such as startle the world into attention by their audacity and extravagance; or they are chiefly of a superficial kind, lying upon the surfaces of manners; or arising out of a selection and arrangement of inci- dents, by which the mind is kept upon the stretch of curiosity, and the fancy amused without the trouble of thought.84
Contempt for the herd grazing on whatever is fashionable can be seen in Wordsworth’s scathing description of the people who follow the crowd to look through a telescope presented by a showman in Leicester Square. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 237
Rather than wondering at the vision of the moon and stars afforded by the instrument, the gazers are unsatisfied:
Or must we be constrained to think that these Spectators rude, Poor in estate, of manners base, men of the multitude, Have souls which never yet have ris’n, and therefore prostrate lie? No, no, this cannot be—Men thirst for power and majesty!85
The opposition between physical and spiritual prostration and thirsting for power and majesty seems odd, as the poem leads the reader to expect the contrast to be between the spiritually flat-lined and the risen, the enlightened and imaginative, rather than the ambitious who thirst for power. The power and majesty are, however, presumably those of the heavenly bodies, and ‘Men’ here are those who can perceive them. Newlyn connects the stars of the poem with the Romantic metaphor for creative genius, suggesting that the poem represents ‘the impossibility of sustaining the mystery of genius in an age that takes poetry for granted’.86 She reads stargazing as ‘a wishful metaphor’ which signifies Wordsworth’s compensation for the public’s indifference by the ascription of ‘a mysterious distance to poetic discourse’, but adds that ‘the conven- tional rhyme on name/fame [in “The silver Moon with all her Vales, and Hills of mightiest fame, / Do they betray us when they’re seen? and are they but a name?”]’ suggests a more personal longing to achieve the last- ing recognition which Coleridge and Hazlitt attach to great works of the past. The poem posits a series of propositions concerning the reasons for the crowd’s failure to react to the transcendent experience, each of which is given seemingly equal weight. One of these attributes to the gazers a more appropriate Romantic reaction, asking whether perhaps ‘deep and earnest thought’ was at work, leading to a ‘grave and steady joy’ that rejects ‘all show of pride, admits no outward sign,/Because not of this noisy world, but silent and divine!’ The register of the final quatrain, however, suggests otherwise.
Whatever be the cause, ’tis sure that they who pry and pore Seem to meet with little gain, seem less happy than before: One after One they take their turns, nor have I one espied That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied. 238 S. BYRNE
To pry is not the same as blissful contemplation, and there is a hint that the gazers’ dissatisfaction arises from their having failed to ‘gain’ from the experience in the material ways that they could understand. Rather than being ravished or fulfilled, they are slack, both slumped in posture and sluggish and remiss. Wordsworth is far from alone among Romantic writers in expressing mistrust or contempt for the undefined ‘public’. In The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge reflects on the transference of flattering dedications from patron to public:
Among other odd burrs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activ- ity, we have the READING PUBLIC. […] Among the Revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the nature of the introductory sentences and prefa- tory matter in serious books is not the least striking. The same gross flattery which disgusts us in the dedications to individuals in the elder writers, is now transferred to the Nation at large, or the READING PUBLIC.87
Keats writes to Reynolds that the more he knows of what his diligence ‘may in time probably effect’, the more his heart distends ‘with Pride and Obstinacy’: ‘I feel it in my power to become a popular writer—I feel it in my power to refuse the poisonous suffrage of a public.’88 Rather than disparaging the courting of public taste, Shelley refutes the ‘language of men’, or common men, as fit for poetry, stating that he has employed ‘a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refine- ment of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms’. This is reminiscent of Cowper’s ideal of poetic language (which he finds in Prior):
To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to mar- shal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoni- ously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.89
This might be Wordsworth’s ‘language of men’, but it is the language of articulate men educated in late eighteenth-century ideal qualities of har- mony, elegance, and decorum, and would have been associated with ‘cul- tivated’, middle- and upper-class, speech. Even Shelley’s ‘familiar style’ is not allowable ‘in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal’ or for ‘any sub- 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 239 ject which relates to common life, where the passion […] touches the boundaries of that which is ideal’.90 The subject of poems such as ‘Song: Men of England’ is not ideal but material and therefore suitable for a familiar style, but its language is evidently not for those without education and refinement of sentiment. If the vulgar idiom expurgated from Shelley’s poetry is the language of the proletariat, then Engel’s assertion that Shelley’s poems find most of their readers in the proletariat whereas the middle classes have expurgated and castrated editions91 is incongruous. Rather than specific words, Engel’s term castration refers to the omission of sections and whole poems from selected editions and to the formation of the Shelley myth described by Jerrold Hogle as emasculating Shelley’s work to make him a pure poet concerned with aesthetics and inspiration, suitable and safe for ‘developing middle-class tastes’.92
Poetry, Criticism, and Class As book-buyers and renters and a wider public replaced the private patron, so those who brought books to the notice of readers, and who influenced readers’ choices, became more and more important. The power of the circulating libraries from the 1720s and, later, book clubs and societies to determine the sales and even the contents of novels has been extensively discussed elsewhere. These also helped to determine the readership of poetry, as did, throughout the second half of the long eighteenth century, the critic and reviewer, and, hence, the periodical. During the earlier part of this period, quarterly publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review dominated and to an extent shaped public taste. Hazlitt accuses these journals’ reviewers of partisanship and rank snob- bery, citing their preferential treatment of the titled and the protégés of the titled, so that patronage persists in a new form. His ‘Aristocracy of Letters’ distinguishes between the hack writer who publishes for money and the noted man of letters who sits on the laurels of reputation and publishes little or nothing. He finds that a title is a ticket to literary fame.
Lord Byron complains that Horace Walpole was not properly appreciated, ‘first, because he was a gentleman; and secondly, because he was a noble- man.’ His Lordship stands in one, at least, of the predicaments here men- tioned, and yet he has had justice, or somewhat more, done him. He towers above his fellows by all the height of the peerage. If the poet lends a grace to the nobleman, the nobleman pays it back to the poet with interest. What 240 S. BYRNE
a fine addition is ten thousand a year and a title to the flaunting pretensions of a modern rhapsodist! His name so accompanied becomes the mouth well: it is repeated thousands of times, instead of hundreds, because the reader in being familiar with the Poet’s works seems to claim acquaintance with the Lord.
The ‘Noble Bard’ is also protected from critics’ opinions.
The double barrier of his pretensions baffles their puny timid efforts [….] his Lordships blaze of reputation culminates from his rank and place in soci- ety [….] There is not a more hopeless, a more despised animal than a mere author without any extrinsic advantages of birth, breeding or fortune to set him off. The real ore of talents or learning must be stamped before it will pass current.93
This is not entirely fair. Byron’s early publication, Hours of Idleness,94 which made much of his title as well as his youth, was castigated in a review by Henry Brougham, who complains of Byron’s frequent allusions to his rank and lineage:
sometimes in poetry, sometimes in notes; and while giving up his claim on the score of rank, he takes care to remember us of Dr Johnson’s saying, that when a nobleman appears as an author his merit should be handsomely acknowledged. In truth, it is this consideration only that induces us to give Lord Byron’s poems a place in our review, besides our desire to counsel him, that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are consid- erable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account.95
Whilst allowing that it is ‘a sort of privilege of poets to be egotists’, Brougham asserts that they shouldn’t abuse the privilege and that Byron should not know, or not seem to know, so much about his own ancestry.96 The Christian Observer also refused to admire Byron on the basis of his title excusing his poetic matter, arguing that it was the duty of the Christian to abstain from reading his work. ‘It would shew that, with a British pub- lic, no superiority of rank or intellect can screen an impious and licentious author from the just punishment of being reprobated and consigned to oblivion.’97 Hazlitt’s attack on nepotism moves from titles to coteries and mutual recommendations. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 241
they prop up one another’s rickety heads at [Murray’s] shop, and a spurious reputation, like false argument, runs in a circle. [Croker] affirms that [Gifford] is sprightly, and [Gifford] that [Croker] is genteel; [Disraeli] that [Jacob] is wise, and [Jacob] that [Disraeli] is good-natured […] You must commence toad-eater to have your observations attended to; if you are independent, unconnected, you will be regarded as a poor creature. Your opinion is honest, you will say; then ten to one it is not profitable. It is at any rate your own. So much the worse; for then it is not the world’s.98
Keats is offered as the prime example of one who, without either title, unearned fame or coterie, was ignored or disparaged by critics.
The poet Keats had not this sort of protection for his person—he lay bare to weather—the serpent stung him and the poison-tree dropped upon this lit- tle western flower:—when the mercenary servile crew approached him he had no pedigree to show them, no rent-roll to hold out in reversion for their praise: he was not in any great man’s train, nor the butt and puppet of a lord—he could only offer them […] they recked not of his gift, but tore him with hideous shouts and laughter.99
Keats’s social position, the death of his parents, and his early death seem to invite comparisons with Thomas Chatterton. Beth Lau, analysing the influence of Chatterton on Keats, particularly Chatterton’s politic writing, draws a further parallel between the relationship with Chatterton and other poetic forebears and the community of living confrères in the Hunt circle. Quoting Jeffrey Cox, Lau writes that the
‘close but not closed coterie […] is a model for a larger transformed com- munity’ in which young men of the middling classes like Keats and Matthew can invoke the muse, write about classical myths, aspire to enter the ranks of great English poets, sympathize with the disadvantaged and persecuted in society and in other respects unsettle the system of class privilege that Lockhart and others wished to preserve.100
Lau argues that in ‘To George Felton Matthew’, Keats ‘seeks to cultivate a seditious brotherhood of poets on two levels’, one among the living, the other ‘in the afterlife where Chatterton, Shakespeare, Milton and others band together in support of genius and against all the forces of the unre- formed “pitiless world” (line 65) that conspire to repress it’.101 242 S. BYRNE
The members of the so-called Cockney School were not categorised as primitive geniuses or rural labourers; they lacked the novelty value of Mary Collier or Stephen Duck, the avidity for copy of earlier periodicals, and the patronage of the wealthy of the days before commercial publishing became the norm. They were prey to the movement in periodical publishing that added criticism to miscellany. The Edinburgh Review was established in 1802, the Examiner in 1808, the Quarterly Review in 1809, the New Monthly Magazine in 1814, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817. The poets in the circle of Leigh Hunt did not market themselves as labouring or plebeian poets but as poets. Nonetheless, class played a large part in their treatment in the new journals. The term Cockney School was first used in a now notorious article in Blackwood’s, which responded to Leigh Hunt’s article ‘Three Young Poets’, published in the Examiner the year before. The epigraph to this piece is taken from a poem by Cornelius Webb, later to be referred by Keats as a poetaster and only incidental visitor to the group that met regularly.
Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on) Of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron (Our England’s Dante)—Wordsworth—HUNT and KEATS, The Muses’ sons of promise, and of what feats He yet may do.102
The author takes ‘the honour of christening’ this ‘new school’ in parallel to the Lake School, finding Leigh Hunt ‘its chief doctor and professor’, and thereby suggesting that his praise as a reviewer of the work of Cornelius Webb, Percy Shelley, and John Keats was biased, since they have been raised in his own image. Hunt is found ‘a man certainly of some talent, of extraordinary pretensions both in wit, poetry and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking, and man- ners in all respects’. The ‘moral depravity’ of Hunt in particular and the ‘school’ in general is attacked in terms which conflate morality and class and which use simile to allude to moral failings which cannot be made actual accusations. The poetry is said to
resemble ‘a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses’; the muse of the poet to speak 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 243
indelicately, like a tea-sipping milliner-girl’ her ‘indecency’ seems ‘a disease’. Leigh Hunt’s ideas the sublime, and his own powers, ‘bear a considerable resemble to those of his friend Bottom, the weaver’. ‘As a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel—in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand. He has been allowed for a moment to look from the ante-chamber to the saloon […] and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh- coloured silk stockings.’103
Class bias becomes more overt when the review turns to the dedication of Hunt’s ‘Rimini’.
The insult which he offered to Lord Byron […] in which he, a paltry cock- ney newspaper scribbler, had the assurance to address one of the most nobly-born of English Patricians, and one of the first geniuses whom the world ever produced as ‘My Dear Byron’ […] excited a feeling of utmost loathing and disgust in the public mind […] We dare say Mr Hunt has some fine dreams about the true nobility being the nobility of talent, and flatters himself that with those who acknowledge only that sort of rank, he himself passes for being the peer of Byron. He is sadly mistaken. He is completely a Plebeian in his mind as he is in his rank and station. in society.104
The ‘Letter to Mr Leigh Hunt’ in the January 1818 edition of Blackwood’s is patronising in tone, arguing that Hunt’s response should have been kept until ‘Z’ (John Gibson Lockhart) had finished his critical writings on the subject. Whereas the Cockney School essays are represented as reasoned argument, Hunt’s Examiner reply is described as emotional and personal: ‘But you are such a testy person, that you cannot bear to hear the first paragraph of your indictment, without manifesting, by passionate out- cries, your indignation at being dragged forward upon such a charge. Such an ebullition of noble rage might have been better timed’.105 He is finally dismissed in contemptuous terms: ‘I must ask you in my turn, whether you seriously think it in any way incumbent on me to take notice of the silly invectives of every simpleton who writes in a newspaper; and what opinion you would have formed of my discretion, if I had suffered myself to be the dupe of so shallow an artifice?’106 The May edition became yet more personal and contemptuous, addressing Hunt as ‘King of the Cockneys’ (though of course Keats was not a Cockney) and persistently using the mocking register of royal courts.107 244 S. BYRNE
The label ‘Cockney School’ spread; the Quarterly Review uses both it and ‘Hunt’s simple neophyte’ in a review of Endymion,108 whereas the Edinburgh Review makes no reference to the influence of Hunt’s poet- ics or politics in a much more even-handed review of Endymion and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems.109 Webb’s poem is quoted again as the epigraph to ‘The Cockney School of Poetry IV’ in August 1818. Following the declaration in July 1818 that Leigh Hunt would no longer appear in the pages of Blackwood’s (though he is glancingly reviled in this article), Keats has become the target, specifi- cally the ‘drivelling idiocy’ of Endymion and more generally ‘the char- acter and talents of the most worthless and affected versifiers of our time’.110 In reference to the sonnet ‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’, the poet is addressed as ‘good Johnny Keats’ and labelled with Webb ‘city sparks’.111 The ‘Cockney School’ poets are described as ‘uneducated and flimsy striplings’ without ‘learning enough to distin- guish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jar- gon of Cockneys’.112 Though, as has been seen, vernacular poetry and the English Language itself had become increasingly respected and studied in the century before Keats’s birth, the influence of Classical cultures, like that of Classical lan- guages, persisted. The dual vision of Hellenism persisted, however, in that conservative Anglicanism associated subversive politics with subversion of the church, and promoted contentment with one’s lot as an essential of Christian life, so an interest in Hellenic culture and concomitantly pagan religion could be treated with suspicion not only of atheist or heretical traits but also of Jacobinism.113 Keats’s engagement with Romantic Hellenism can be seen as a political as well as poetical choice, an act of appropriation of a form of high culture by a poet who did not receive a Classical education at Enfield Academy and could not read Greek. Whereas the Classically educated Shelley and Byron could write of Prometheus, compose Hellas, translate Plato’s Symposium, and imitate Pindar with impunity, Lockhart reacts to Keats’s audacity by finding noth- ing Greek in Endymion and asserting that no one ‘whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every asso- ciation in the manner which has been adopted by “this son of promise”’. He predicts that no one will again pay Keats for his poetry and recom- mends that he return to his trade. ‘It is a better and a wiser thing to be a 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 245 starving apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John […] but, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado,114 be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry’.115 Ironically, years after Keats’s death, Leigh Hunt himself was to perhaps unwittingly downplay Keats’s Hellenism and Keats. In an edito- rial in The Tatler, he describes Shelley as a philosopher of the school of Plato and Aeschylus and Keats as of the school of Spencer and Milton. Canonical and great though the latter are, the comparison draws atten- tion to ‘home-grown’ as opposed to wider scholarly influences, and hence to class.116 A year later, the relentless attacks on Leigh Hunt and his ‘school’ con- tinued. The ‘Essay V’ questions the right to be heard of such low and egotistical writers.
Why is it they seem to think the world has no right to hear one single word about any other persons than Hunt, the cockney Homer; Hazlitt, the cock- ney Aristotle; and Haydon, the cockney Raphael [….] Mr Hazlitt cannot look round at the Surrey, without resting his smart eye on the idiot admiring grin of several dozens of aspiring apprentices and critical clerks. Mr Hunt cannot be at home at Hampstead, without having his Johnny Keatses and his Corny Webbs to cram sonnets into his waistcoat pockets, and crown his majestic brows with ‘The wreath that DANTE wore!!!’117
In a review of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, the diminutives and refer- ences to non-professional occupations are succeeded by more invective which disclaims its own spleen. The author denies personal animosity and grants Keats some ‘marks of feeling and power’ which could have devel- oped into real poetry had he given up the ‘tricks of Cockneyism’ and the influence of Hunt, but goes on:
[i]t is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them over-rate their own importance, even in the eyes of us that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all a contempt too calm and profound to admit of any admixture of anything like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, as we should about having any feelings at all about any of these people, other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. 246 S. BYRNE
Clearly, the poets had come into the ‘apartment’ of the reviewer, that is, literature, and he is outraged by the audacity of the ‘vermin’ daring to see themselves as authors at all.118 Keats’s inability to read Greek led him to read Homer in translation. His preference for Chapman’s version is in keeping with the approach which no longer modified the language and behaviour represented in the Iliad and Odyssey to accommodate polite culture in Augustan England. Whilst Pope’s preface referred to ‘a Spirit of Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign’d thro’ the World, when no Mercy was shown but for the sake of Lucre, when the greatest Princes were put to the Sword, and their Wives and Daughters made Slaves and Concubines’, his poems ‘transformed the simplicity and natural vigour of the original into the fop-finery of a gentleman of the eighteenth cen- tury’.119 Keats may have felt that Chapman’s vitality and fire were more appropriate to his vision of Greece. Keats’s deployment of his imaginary, a Golden Age of heroes and heroism, gods and goddesses, aesthetic perfec- tion and comprehensive philosophy, grand morality, and the (limited) democracy of the Classical period, of high ideals, provided a badge of cultural capital. It was difficult, however, to incorporate the structure of ancient or Classical Greek society, dominated by a warrior caste, supported by slaves and inimical to women, into a radical poetics. Mythology enabled this, in particular, the story of Prometheus provided the basis for Shelley to do so but so also did the destruction of Greek culture.
Shelley and Radical Politics Shelley’s sonnet ‘England in 1819’120 is among his most clear and specific condition of England’ poems, scourging the Hanoverians and painting the people ‘starved and stabbed’ by a ‘liberticide’ army. Laws are ‘Golden and sanguine; religion is ‘Christless, Godless’. But there remains hope. A glorious ‘Phantom’ may burst out to illuminate the ‘tempestuous day’. This references an ending in which a beginning is seeded, a trope that Jennifer Wallace finds central to Shelley’s prose. Discussing the fragment ‘The Colosseum’, Wallace refers to ‘Shelley’s apparent glee over the ruin- ation of the past’, influenced by Volney’s The Ruins; or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, ‘in which a parallel was drawn between the destruc- tion of the mighty city of Palmyra and the overthrow of the French ancient regime’.121 Wallace observes that ‘[r]uin was to be associated with revolu- 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 247 tion. […M]ixing the dust of the proudest kings with that of the meanest slaves, you called upon us to contemplate this example of EQUALITY’.122 Prometheus is imagined also buried, in his sacred grove in Prometheus Unbound,123 but the song of his ‘woful dooms’ [sic] is still sung in antici- pation of ‘how he shall be loosed, and make the Earth/ One brother- hood’ (II.ii. ll. 93–95). At the end of Act III, Earth summons a spirit, a torch-bearer who will be a guide to Prometheus’s temple. Though it no longer tended, and ‘emulous youths’ no longer honour Prometheus by bearing the ‘lamp which was thine emblem’, nonetheless, Prometheus himself ‘hast borne [the lamp and his message of freedom] most trium- phantly / To this far goal of Time’ (III.iii ll. 168–174). Act III Scene iv offers the vision of The Spirit of the Hour (ll. 127–204), who reports a world in which
[t]he loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless. (ll. 193–195)
In Act IV The Chorus of Spirits announces:
We come from the mind Of human kind Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind, Now ’tis an ocean Of clear emotion, A heaven of serene and mighty motion. (ll. 93–98)
Their task completed:
Our spoil is won, Our task is done, [….]
They declare, in words that might have been adopted by the Chartists whose poetry is examined in the next section:
We will take our plan From the new world of man And our work shall be called Promethean. (ll. 156–158) 248 S. BYRNE
Notes 1. Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4. John D. Morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS Press, 2001). 5. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London: J.S. Jordan, 1791). 6. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: J. Johnson, 1792). 7. For a detailed survey of the reporting of parliamentary business in national and local publications, see Angus Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: Habits of Hearts and Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 112–113. 8. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Late Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790). 9. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies: Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued During the French Revolution, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 8 vols, ed. John Bowring II (Edinburgh: 1843), pp. 486–529. 10. Founded in January 1792. 11. Founded in 1780. 12. Founded April 1792. 13. Founded in November 1792. 14. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy to which is added Queen Liberty and Song- to the Men of England XCI (London: J. Watson, 1842). The 1832 first edition edited and introduced by Leigh Hunt omitted the repeated stanza and last line. 15. A second series, The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine followed in 1798. 16. For example, Johann Joachim Winkelmann, The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), transl. G. Henry Lodge, 4 vols. (London: Chapman, 1849–1872). 17. John Lamprière, Biblotheca classica (Reading: Thomas Cadell, 1788). 18. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 5. 19. Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism 1700–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 17. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 249
20. Webb, op. cit., pp. 31–32. 21. For a discussion of Bloomfield’s relationship with his sponsors, see Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee, ‘The Vaccine Rose: Patronage, Pastoralism, and Public Health’ in White et al., op. cit., pp. 142–158. 22. Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy (London: Vernor and Hood, 1800). 23. Joseph Weston, Preface, Joseph Weston, ed., Remains of Robert Bloomfield, 2 vols (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1824) I, pp. ix–x. 24. William J. Christmas, ‘The Farmer’s Boy and Contemporary Politics’ in White. op. cit., pp. 27–48 (33). 25. Christmas, op. cit., p. 37. 26. Christmas, op. cit., p. 38. 27. Christmas, op. cit., p. 39. 28. This was the Treaty of London, a preliminary to the Peace of Amiens which was signed in March of the following year. Robert Bloomfield, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (London: Verner and Hood; Longman and Rees, 1802), pp. ix–xi. 29. Bloomfield, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, pp. 79–85. 30. Thompson, op. cit., p. 11. 31. Charles Burney, review of the Lyrical Ballads, the Monthly Review 29 (June 1799), 207. 32. Thompson, ibid. 33. Thompson, ibid. 34. Thompson, op. cit., p. 14. 35. Thompson, op. cit., p. 23. 36. William Wordsworth, Letter to John Wilson (7 June, 1802) in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I, The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revd edn ed. C. L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), pp. 353–358 (353). 37. William Wordsworth, The Excursion I, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Edward Moxon, 1847), p. 449. 38. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ (1802), Major Works, p. 597. 39. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, Major Works, pp. 596–597. 40. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, Major Works, p. 597. 41. William Wordsworth, Letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (5 May 1809) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth Vol. II, The Middle Years 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revd edn, ed. Mary Trevelyan Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 331–336 (335). 42. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, VI in Major Works, p. 459. 43. William Hazlitt, ‘On Mr Wordsworth’s “Excursion”, The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners, 2 vols (London: 250 S. BYRNE
Constable, and Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1817), II, pp. 95–112 (111). 44. David Vincent shows the decline of illiteracy among males in Europe in The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Illiteracy in females in England is shown to decline from nearly 60% to approximately 5% between 1800 and 1910. In males, from 40% to less than 5%, pp. 9–10. 45. Anonymous, The Sturdy Reformer’, The Anti-Levelling Songster (London: J. Downes, 1793), I:2, 8–10. 46. Anonymous, ‘The Loyal Briton’, The Anti-Levelling Songster I:2, 15–16 (16). 47. Williams, op. cit., pp. 32–33. 48. William Hazlitt, ‘On Mr Wordsworth’s “Excursion”: The Same Subject Continued”’, Round Table II, pp. 112–122 (114). 49. Hazlitt, ‘Excursion Continued’, p. 117. 50. Ibid. 51. William Hazlitt, ‘The Periodical Press’, The Edinburgh Review XXXVIII (May 1823), 349–378. 52. William Hazlitt, ‘Fine Arts, Whether they are Promoted by Academies’ The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols, London 1930–1934, 18, p. 46. 53. William Hazlitt, ‘On Thomson and Cowper’, Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution (1818), 2nd edn (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), pp. 168–205 (173). 54. Hazlitt, ‘On Thomson and Cowper’, pp. 188–189. 55. Hazlitt, ‘On Thomson and Cowper’, p. 190. 56. William Hazlitt, ‘On The Aristocracy of Letters’ in Table Talk, or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821); 2nd edn (London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1824), pp. 91–113 (106). 57. William Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplemental to the Preface’ (1815) in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Smyser III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 62–84 (83). 58. Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplemental’, Prose Works, p. 84. 59. Williams, op. cit., p. 34. 60. The Autobiography Times, Contemporaries and Opinions of Sir Egerton Brydges II (London: Cochrane and McCrone, 1834), pp. 202–203. Williams’ note. 61. Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas More, 8 vols, ed. Lord John Russell VII (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), p. 46. Williams’ note. 62. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 9. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 251
63. Newlyn, op. cit., p. 10. 64. William Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplemental to the Preface’ (1815) in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Smyser III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 62–84 (80). 65. Williams, op. cit., p. 36. 66. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry I in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1840), pp. 45–46. 67. William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth, Poetical Works (Oxford, 1908), p. 938. Williams’ note. 68. Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplemental to Preface’, Prose Works, p. 81. 69. Wordsworth, Preface, p. 938. Williams’ note. 70. Paradise Lost VII 31. The phrase is repeated in the ‘Essay Supplemental to the Preface’, Prose Works, p. 70. 71. William Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion (1814) in Prose Works III, p. 7. 72. Hazlitt, ‘On the Progress of Art: Why the Arts are not Progressive: A Fragment’, Round Table II pp. 252–261 (261). 73. Hazlitt, op. cit., p. 259. 74. Hazlitt, op. cit., p. 260. 75. Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 220. 76. William Wordsworth, Letter to Sara Hutchinson, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth Vol. II, The Middle Years 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revd edn, Mary Trevelyan Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 120. 77. Hazlitt, ‘The Times Newspaper’, on the connection between toad-eaters and tyrants’, Political Essays (London: William Hone, 1819), p. 162. 78. Hazlitt, Lecture VII, Lectures on the English Poets, 2nd edn (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), p. 260. 79. Goldberg surveys the history of conceptions of unpaid art and leisure. See op. cit., pp. 1–3. 80. Goldberg, op. cit., p. 215. 81. Goldberg discusses poetry as just one among a number of professions contemplated by Wordsworth. See op. cit., pp. 216–217. 82. Wordsworth, letter to William Matthews (June 1794) in de Selincourt, op. cit., p. 123. 83. Wordsworth, letter to John Wilson (June 1802). 84. Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ in Poems by William Wordsworth with Additional Poems, A New Preface, and A Supplementary Essay, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown: 1815), I, pp. 372–373. 252 S. BYRNE
85. William Wordsworth, ‘Star Gazers’ in Major Works, p. 322. 86. Newlyn, op. cit., p. 15. 87. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, or, The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society (London: Gale and Fenner et al.,1816), pp. 45–46. 88. John Keats, Letter to R.H. Reynolds (25 August 1819). The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, II, p. 146. 89. William Cowper, Letter to William Unwin (17 January 1782) in William Hayley, The Life and Works of William Cowper, 2 vols, II, Private Correspondence, ed. T.S. Grimshawe (London: Sanders and Otley, 1835), pp. 15–18 (17). 90. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letter to Leigh Hunt (15 August 1819) in Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2, p. 108. 91. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, transl. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (1892); rprnt (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 240. 92. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’ in Michael O’Neill, ed., Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 118–142 (118). 93. Hazlitt, ‘Aristocracy of Letters’, pp. 102–105. 94. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Hours of Idleness, A Series of Poems Original and Translated, By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor (Newark: S. and J. Ridge, 1807). 95. Henry Brougham, review of Hours of Idleness, the Edinburgh Review 9 (January 1808), 285–289 (285–286). 96. Brougham, op. cit., p. 288. 97. ‘F’, ‘Observations on the Character, Opinions, and Writings of the Late Lord Byron’, The Christian Observer, Series beginning XXV: 2 (February 1825), 80 continued in XXV: 3, 4 and 5. XXV: 5 (May 1825), 288. 98. Hazlitt, op. cit., p. 108. 99. Hazlitt, op. cit., p. 107. 100. Beth Lau, ‘Class and Politics in Keats’s Admiration of Chatterton’, Keats- Shelley Journal 53 (2004), 25–38 (34); Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 99. Lau’s note. 101. Lau, ibid. 102. ‘Z’, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. I’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine II: 7 (October 1817), 38–41 (38). 103. ‘Z’. op. cit., pp. 39–40. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 253
104. ‘Z’, op. cit., p. 41. 105. ‘Z’, ‘Letter to from Z to Mr. Leigh Hunt’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine II: 10 (January 1818), 414–417 (414). 106. ‘Z’, op. cit., p. 417. 107. ‘Z’, ‘Letter to Mr. Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine III: 14 (May 1818), 196–201. 108. Unsigned review of John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance, The Quarterly Review XXXVII (April and December 1818), 204–208. 109. Unsigned review of John Keats, Endymion and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, The Edinburgh Review XXXIV: 67 (August– November 1820), 204–213. 110. ‘Z’, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine III: 17 (August 1818), 519–524 (519). 111. ‘Z’, op. cit., p. 520. 112. ‘Z’, op. cit., pp. 520–521. 113. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 36–37. 114. Dr. Sangrado was a quack who bled patients copiously and made them drink hot water in Alain René Lesage, L’histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1747). 115. ‘Z’, op. cit., p. 524. 116. Leigh Hunt, ‘Mr Elliston, Mr. Huskisson, Modern Schools of Poetry’, The Tatler: A Daily Paper of Literature, Fine Arts, Music and the Stage 284 (1 August 1831), 105–107 (106). 117. ‘Z’. ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. V’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine V: 25 (April 1819), 97–100 (97). 118. Unsigned review of Prometheus Unbound, Blackwood’s Magazine VII: 42 (September 1820), 679–688 (686). 119. Webb, op. cit., p. 15. 120. ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, England in 1819’ in The Poetic Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed Mary Shelly vol. III (London: Edward Moxon, 1839). 121. M. Volney, The Ruins; or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1795), pp. 6–13, cited in Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 159. Wallace’s note. 122. Wallace, ibid., quoting Volney, op. cit., p. xii. 123. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820). Subsequent line references will be to this edition. 254 S. BYRNE
Bibliography ‘F’, ‘Observations on the Character, Opinions, and Writings of the Late Lord Byron’, The Christian Observer, Series beginning XXV: 2 (February 1825), 80 continued in XXV:3, 4 and 5. XXV: 5 (May 1825), 288. ‘Z’, ‘Letter to from Z to Mr Leigh Hunt’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine II, no. 10 (January 1818a), 414–417. ———’, ‘Letter to Mr Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine III, no. 14 (May 1818b), 196–201. ———’, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine III, no. 17 (August 1818c), 519–524. ———’, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. I’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine II, no. 7 (October 1817), 38–41. ———’, ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No. V’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine V, no. 25 (April 1819), 97–100. Anon, The Anti-Levelling Songster. London: J. Downes, 1793. Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Anarchical Fallacies: Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued During the French Revolution’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 8 vols, ed. John Bowring II. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. Blair, Kirstie, and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring- Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bloomfield, Robert, The Farmer’s Boy. London: Vernor and Hood, 1800. ———, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs. London: Verner and Hood; Longman and Rees, 1802. Brougham, ‘Henry, review of Hours of Idleness’, The Edinburgh Review 9 (January 1808), 285–289. Brydges, Sir Egerton, The Autobiography Times, Contemporaries and Opinions of Sir Egerton Brydges II. London: Cochrane and McCrone, 1834. Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Late Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley, 1790. Burney, Charles, review of the Lyrical Ballads, The Monthly Review 29 (June 1799), 207. Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Byron, George Gordon Lord, Hours of Idleness, A Series of Poems Original and Translated, By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor. Newark: S. and J. Ridge, 1807. Christmas, William J., ‘The Farmer’s Boy and Contemporary Politics’, in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, eds Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan. Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006, pp. 27–48. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 255
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Statesman’s Manual, or, The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society. London: Gale and Fenner et al., 1816. Cox, Jeffrey N., Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (1892); Reprint. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936. Fulford, Tim, and Debbie Lee, ‘The Vaccine Rose: Patronage, Pastoralism, and Public Health’, in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, eds Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan. Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006. Goldberg, Brian, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hawkins, Angus, Victorian Political Culture: Habits of Hearts and Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Hayley, William, The Life and Works of William Cowper, 2 vols. London: Sanders and Otley, 1835. Hazlitt, William, ‘On Mr Wordsworth’s “Excursion”’, in The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners, 2 vols, Vol. II. London: Constable, and Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1817, 95–112. ———, ‘On Thomson and Cowper’, in Lectures on the English Poets, Delivered at the Surrey Institution (1818), 2nd edn. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819a, pp. 168–205. ———, Lectures on the English Poets, 2nd edn. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819b. ———, Political Essays, 162. London: William Hone, 1819c. ———, ‘The Periodical Press’, The Edinburgh Review XXXVIII (May 1823), 349–378. ———, ‘On The Aristocracy of Letters’, in Table Talk, or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821), 2nd edn. London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1824, pp. 91–113. ———, ‘Fine Arts, Whether They Are Promoted by Academies’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols, Vol. 18, 46. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930–1934. Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Hunt, Leigh, ‘Mr Elliston, Mr Huskisson, Modern Schools of Poetry’, The Tatler: A Daily Paper of Literature, Fine Arts, Music and the Stage 284 (1 August 1831), 105–107. Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 256 S. BYRNE
Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols, Vol. II, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Lamprière, John, Biblotheca classica. Reading: Thomas Cadell, 1788. Lau, Beth, ‘Class and Politics in Keats’s Admiration of Chatterton’, Keats-Shelley Journal 53 (2004), 25–38. Milton, John, Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books. The Author John Milton. The Second Edition Revised and Augmented by the same Author. London: Printed by S. Simmons, 1674, Book VII, p. 175. More, Thomas, Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas More, 8 vols, ed. Lord John Russell. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856. Morillo, John D., Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. New York: AMS Press, 2001. Newlyn, Lucy, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man. London: J.S. Jordan, 1791. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems. London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820. ———, ‘Defence of Poetry I’, in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1840, pp. 45–46. ———, The Masque of Anarchy to Which Is Added Queen Liberty and Song- to the Men of England. London: J. Watson, 1842. ———, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Unsigned Review of John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance, The Quarterly Review XXXVII (April and December 1818), 204–208. ———, ‘Endymion and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems’, The Edinburgh Review XXXIV, no. 67 (August–November 1820), 204–213. Unsigned review of Prometheus Unbound, Blackwood’s Magazine VII, no. 42 (September 1820), 679–688. Vincent, David, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Wallace, Jennifer, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Webb, Timothy, English Romantic Hellenism 1700–1824. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982. Weston, Joseph, ed., Remains of Robert Bloomfield, 2 vols. London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1824. 5 THE LATE EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 257
Winkelmann, Johann Joachim, The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). Trans. G. Henry Lodge, 4 vols. London: Chapman, 1849–1872. Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: J. Johnson, 1792. Wordsworth, William, Poems by William Wordsworth with Additional Poems, a New Preface, and a Supplementary Essay, 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815. ———, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: Edward Moxon, 1847. ———, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth Vol. II, The Middle Years 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. edn Mary Trevelyan Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ———, ‘Essay Supplemental to the Preface (1815)’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W.J.B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 62–84. ———, Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. ———, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I, The Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. edn. ed C. L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015. CHAPTER 6
The Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century
Introduction The extent of the proliferation and importance of plebeian poetry has become evident due to a number of studies and anthologies published since Martha Vicinus’s seminal work The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth- Century British Working-Class Literature in 1974.1 Some of those include Phyllis Mary Ashraft’s Introduction to Working-Class Literature in Great Britain (1978); Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji’s Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–19002; Ian Haywood’s The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–18603; Gustav H. Klaus’s The Literature of Labour: 200 Years of Working-Class Writing4; Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–19825; Paul Murphy’s Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working- Class Periodicals, 1816–18586; Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes7; Mike Sanders’s ‘“A Jackass Load of Poetry”: The Northern Star’s Poetry Column 1838–1852’8; James Epstein’s The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–18429 and The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History10; and Peter Schekner’s An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class 1830s–1850s,11 as well as introductions to anthologies such as Brian Maidment, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in
© The Author(s) 2020 259 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_6 260 S. BYRNE
Victorian Britain,12 and John Goodridge (general editor), Nineteenth- Century Labouring-Class Poets.13 There have also been a number of studies which focus on the poetry of plebeian women,14 and on poetry of specific geographical areas, such as Neil Astley’s Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England, which brings together essays on and poetry from the region, much of it in dialect.15 Past sections of the study have looked at poems by individuals on the subject of class and the means of production by which different classes circulated poetry. Self-identification as a member of a group of writers of the same class and self-professed affiliation with published labouring-class poets have been discussed in eighteenth-century works, but this study has not so far identified an organised, coherent group movement of poetry in relation to class. The focus of this section is poetry which expresses a sense of common cause and common class-consciousness, particularly Chartist poetry. This is not to say that Chartist writing was any more homogeneous or harmonious than Chartist political strategy was,16 but it is to say that the inundation of radical newspapers such as The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, The Northern Liberator, The Friend of the People, and the Chartist Circular by poetry about the conditions of the industrial labouring class suggests a strong sense of a common cause and of the potential agency of poetry. That agency came from the reinforcement of the sense of common cause and common causes of suffering that widely circulated poetry itself encouraged. The Northern Star could proclaim:
This is one of the proudest characteristics of the age we live in, this poetry of the people, written by and for themselves. Never till the present time has the poetry of the people been written […] ringing out the people’s political, moral, and social aspirations, and elevating the standard of Humanity for all.17
Agency was perhaps also fostered by what Christopher Caudwell refers to as poetry’s capacity to bring to consciousness a plasticity that prevents complete coincidence with external reality and confers on the reader the capacity to imagine things other than they are.18 The extent of the effec- tiveness of poetry as a particular kind of discourse is usefully discussed by Sanders, who notes that ‘if poetry only performs the general political work of language, then a poem becomes a mode of ideological/discursive encoding which is ultimately reduced to a passive reflection of an already “known” moment’ which leads to a kind of literary criticism ‘in which 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 261 poems are broken into to provide decorative illustration for a prior histori- cal fact’.19 Sanders ascribes two levels of political agency to poetry. The first kinds of texts, ‘discrete interventions in specific political debates, which are readily identifiable and traceable’, belong to the realm of ‘gen- eral linguistic struggle’, so ‘their status as poems is an incidental rather than an essential aspect of their agency’.20 In the second, however, ‘we see the total qualitative transformation of consciousness wrought by poetry’. Sanders asserts that here, political agency ‘arises directly out of poetry’s creative capacities; its ability [as Caudwell argued] to imagine things differently’. That poetry was perceived as both important and effective by plebeian poets of the mid-century is evident. In ‘The Poet’s Mission’, Ernest Jones (1819–1868) asks:
Who is it calls up glories past From tombs of churches old? And proudly bids the hero last, Tho’ fades his grassy mould? [and] Treads death’s ascending path; Yet stronger than the fiery storm Of tyrants in their wrath?21 (ll. 9–16)
He answers, the Bard, who
[m]akes others strong with his own strength. (l. 27)
In ‘The Poet’s Hope’,22 Allen Davenport (1775–1846), a follower of Spence, presents the poet as prophet who can see through ‘the dark vista of futurity’. John Critchley Prince’s (1808–1866) ‘To Poesy’23 references a Romantic lyric conception of poetry as a solitary pursuit for meditation, inward-looking, and consolation, but elsewhere, his poetry has a social and moral function (see below). The Lancashire dialect poet Samuel Laycock (1826–1893) writes comically of the pains of composition, advis- ing a younger poet against it24:
Heaw would t’loike goin’ reawnd wi’ a bag full o’ books? Heaw would t’loike to go hawkin’ thi brains? 262 S. BYRNE
Or, when tha’s bin tryin’ to do some kind act, To be towd thar’t a foo’ for thi pains. (ll. 48–51)
Like Davenport, Critchley Prince, and others, however, Laycock also wrote overtly political poems such as ‘Starved to Death’ and ‘Written for a Meeting Held at Great Ecclestone’.25 Most confident of the importance of the plebeian poet are Charles Cole (dates unknown) and Fanny Forrester (1852–1859). Cole represents the poet as charged by heaven to speak for liberty. The poet’s only rest is the goal of freedom, till then his spirit is bound in a spell
That spell is on my spirit still: Yes! lovely Freedom! yes! I will The task by heaven assign’d fulfil— And wake the Lyre for thee! The dream of boyhood still is bright And, bursting through Oppression’s night, I see a radiant form of light, Celestial Liberty!26 (ll. 17–24)
Forrester predicts eternal fame for the dying poet:
The great may flaunt their pampered bards above him, But when their laurels shall be sere and brown, Kind heaven will grant, because the lowliest love him, To the poor rhymester and eternal crown.27
This, then, was the period of poetry of protest, the period of the social problem or condition of England poem as much as the social problem or condition of England novel. In 1939, Maynard Keynes states that the ‘liberal stock’ of England had ‘won us our civil and religious liberties and humanised the working class last century’.28 Just as it was deemed neces- sary for prose rhetoric to convince readers that the underclasses were of the same human species as the upper29—felt the same, suffered the same— so it was for poetry. In 1853, Charles Dickens hailed the demise of patronage in literature. ‘Literature has turned happily from individual patrons, sometimes munifi- cent, often sordid, always few, and has found there at once its highest 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 263 purpose, its natural range of action and its best reward.’30 He celebrated the saving of literature from
the shame of the purchased dedication, from the scurrilous and dirty work of Grub Street, from the dependent seat on sufferance at my Lord Duke’s table to-day, and from the sponging-house or Marshalsea to-morrow—from that venality which, by a fine moral retribution, has degraded statesmen even to a greater extent than authors, because the statesman entertained a low belief in the universality of corruption, while the author yielded only to the dire necessity of his calling—from all such evils the people have set lit- erature free.
Nineteenth-century working-class readers could not contribute much towards saving authors from debtors’ prison by purchasing books, and patrons remained important, if not essential, for many. Outlets for book and other publications for working-class political discourse continued, however, thanks to editors and patrons both working and middle classes, including Thomas Cooper, John Bedford Leno, and Eliza Cook, Ben Brierley, John Cassell, D.E. Edwards, William and Mary Howitt, and William James Linton. There were affordable anthology pamphlets by poets such as Ernest Jones31 and serialised anthologies such as Linton’s the National: A Library for the People (from January 1839). Broadsides brought poetry to a wide audience, and dialect poetry, focused on both local and national issues, proliferated. It was, however, still difficult and could be almost impossible to find a publisher, as shown by the case of Mary Hutton (1794–1859), whose initial struggles to find a publisher or subscribers are described by Meagan Timney.32 Working-class poets who were published could be subject to the ‘interdiction’ of the ‘brutally effec- tive’ class system.33
[T]he testimonies of almost all published working-class poets to the difficul- ties they encountered strongly suggest that it interdicted ‘Parnassian’ as well as non-‘Parnassian’ efforts of many more unschooled manual laborers. Middle-class editors’ moods and choices were constrained not only by per- sonal beliefs about ‘appropriate’ subjects for ‘humble’ authors, but by more arbitrary preferences of middle-class journal and book purchasers, and other market-driven constraints. Strong evidence suggests, for example, that many editors and anthologists selected women poets’ blandest effusions, and repressed unseemly expressions of ‘strong’ thought. 264 S. BYRNE
Nonetheless, political poetry, radical, reformist, protesting, by plebeian poets continued to be published. As Ebenezer Elliot says:
[H]e has been unjustly blamed for the stern colours in which he paints the sublimity of British wretchedness. In what other manner could a true poet have depicted the blessedness of ultra-taxation, bread monopoly, and their inevitable result—the beautiful battle of ten dogs for one bone?34
Given the extent of poetic composition, publishing, and discussion of poetry, it seems incredible that in a lecture to the Mechanics Institution in 1852, the Reverend Frederick Robertson could feel the need to assert that whilst poetry is assumed to be of little interest to working men, he could demonstrate that it could and should be.
Poetry may be a fitting study for men of leisure, but it seems out of the ques- tion for Working Men;—a luxury or the rich, but to attempt to interest the poor in it, is as much out of place as to introduce them into a cabinet of curiosities, or a gallery of pictures.35
In his discourse on an essentially Romantic poetics, Robertson gives an example from Pope at his most flippant as an example of poetry that those who have not the privilege of ‘being “admitted into the best company”’ will regard as not for them but ‘among the luxuries of the wealthy and idle’. In the second lecture, Robertson seems to have been surprised to have learned that his audience was already acquainted with the two orders of poets he has referenced. He has heard that both orders have been discussed:
some warmly defending them, and others as warmly impugning. For myself, it is an abundant reward to find that Working Men can be interested in such questions; that they can debate the question whether Pope was a poet, and be induced to read Tennyson.36
Robertson’s conception of true poetry is imagination manifest in symbols; it generates fervour. His analogy is the relationship between a flag or regi- mental colours and the silks from which they are made: his example sol- diers’ efforts to defend the former and to fight and die rather than have the latter lost or dishonoured. Having established this connection between the words of poetry and the manly and patriotic deeds of heroes, Robertson announces that the true poets of the future must be working men. He had 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 265 previously asserted that poetry was the great leveller and that the souls of upper and lower classes were equally fit to appreciate poetry, so that ‘false is that mode of thought which recognises the souls of the classes who are not compelled to work as composed of porcelain, and of those who are doomed to work as made of clay’ because both ‘feel, weep, laugh, alike: alike have their aspiring and their degraded moods: that which tells on one human spirit, tells also upon another’. Now, however, the upper ranks are etiolated and enfeebled.
Feudal aristocracy with its associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott. Byron sang its funeral dirge.37
The qualities found in the working classes are ‘tenderness and heroism’ and that desirable quality, ‘endurance’. In answer to the question of what poetry has to do with the working classes, he answers:
Men of work! we want our Poetry from you—from men who will dare to live a brave and true life; not like poor Burns, who was fevered with flattery, manful as he was, and dazzled by the vulgar splendours of the life of the great, which he despised and still longed for; but rather like Ebenezer Elliot, author of the Corn Law Rhymes. Our soldier ancestors told you the significance of high devotion and loyalty which lay beneath the smoke of battle-fields. Now rise and tell us the living meaning there may be in the smoke of manufactories, and the heroism of perseverance, and the poetry of invention, and the patience of uncomplaining resignation.38
Robertson laments the replacement of the mystificatory rhetoric of hero- ism and patriotism with the material realism—‘capital’ of the times. His second military anecdote from the campaigns of Sir Charles Napier in Sindh makes an analogy between poetic symbolism and the gesture alleg- edly made in acknowledgement of the bravery of defeated (and stripped, slashed, and thrown over a precipice) British soldiers by the tying of a red thread around the dead men’s wrists.39 This is followed by a warning that such scenes may soon be enacted in Britain, but a confident prediction that if ‘a foreign foot be planted on our sacred soil’, the working men of Britain will fight, for the abstract values enshrined in and the enthusiasm engendered by poetry. Thus the work may discover that ‘amongst the artizans, and peasants, and working men of England, there are a thousand thousand worthy to be brothers of those heroic eleven who sleep beneath the rocks of Trukkee, with the red thread of Honour round their wrists.’40 266 S. BYRNE
Robertson’s emphasis on imagination and emotion was apposite. As Rose has shown,41 plebeian readers write of their discovery of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley et al. in terms of an awakened imagination, stimulated feelings, and the discovery that their own wonderings and imaginings are neither singular nor pointless. Shelley himself had emphasised this in his letter to Leigh Hunt asking for help in the publication of ‘a little volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagi- nation of the reformers’42 that included The Mask of Anarchy. John Carey states that the difference between ‘the nineteenth-century mob and the twentieth-century mass is literacy. For the first time, a huge literate public had come into being, and consequently every aspect of the production and dissemination of the printed text became subject to revo- lution’.43 ‘Mob’ and ‘mass’ are not synonyms, nor is the distinguishing feature literacy. Mob connotes a gathering of a large group of people pro- testing, rioting, or moved by a common purpose (not necessarily politi- cal), and possibly mob mentality and mob hysteria; the masses are one side of a paradigm on the other of which are the intellectuals, the cultured, and the elite. Nineteenth-century political writing certainly reveals anxieties that the working classes would come together as revolutionary mobs, and there were working-class meetings, protests, and riots. The demonstration of literacy, in writing and in engagement with canonical texts, was a way of raising ‘the mob’ from the image of barbaric thugs bent only on destruc- tion and theft. Literacy was less widespread in the nineteenth than the twentieth century, but it was wider than Carey’s statement allows. Letters, memoirs, and autobiographies testify to the extent of schooling and/or autodidactism, as does the circulation of the inexpensive newspapers of the mid-century, and of course the poetry.44 Carey subsequently modifies the assertion, referring to increased British literacy following the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (extended to Scotland in 1872). Before then, how- ever, the Sunday Schools movement brought literacy and basic mathemat- ics to many working-class children, and in most cases that literacy including writing as well as reading, in spite of the argument of Hannah More (founder of work schools as well as Sunday schools) against the former.
My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week- days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.45 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 267
Dissenting and non-Conformist religious teaching also contributed to working-class radicalism as they had in the earlier period, by encouraging belief in the possibility of universal salvation, the lasting merit of grace and good works, and the absence of hierarchical distinctions between clergy and laity. Much Victorian plebeian poetry expresses pious sentiment, but not all subscribes to the belief that the social hierarchy is the product of God’s will. Poems about social injustice, or what Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849) calls ‘pauper poetry’,46 are not of course the preserve of plebeian poets. Writing as observers and interventionists rather than sufferers, a number of middle-class authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Hood were also publishing poetry on the social problems inherent in the contemporary economic system. From 1848, the formation of the Christian Socialists gave a group identity to some authors who found the conditions of labour incompatible with Christian teaching. A strategy common to both reformist poetry and prose was to homoge- nise and sentimentalise the poor; to paint portraits of goodly, even heroic characters stoically enduring or asking for no more than subsistence; and to emphasise the moral dangers of poverty in denying education, prevent- ing knowledge of the Scriptures, and encouraging recourse to alcohol. Other poets, however, rather than generalising focused on particular injus- tices such as the Corn Laws,47 the Poor Law Amendment Act,48 itself a concomitant of laissez-faire capitalism,49and the campaign to reduce the factory working day to ten hours.50
Chartist Poetry The Chartists had to contend with political disenfranchisement based on the paramount importance of property ownership, as stated by Macaulay in 1842.
In our country, universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist; that it is incompatible with property, and that it is consequently incompatible with civilisation. […] If it be admitted that on the institution of property the well-being of society depends, it follows surely that it would be madness to give supreme power in the state to a class which would not be likely to respect that institution. And, if this be conceded, it seems to me to follow that it would be madness 268 S. BYRNE
to grant the prayer of this petition. I entertain no hope that, if we place the government of the kingdom in the hands of the majority of the males of one-and-twenty told by the head, the institution of property will be respected. If I am asked why I entertain no such hope, I answer, because the hundreds of thousands of males of twenty-one who have signed this petition tell me to entertain no such hope; because they tell me that, if I trust them with power, the first use which they will make of it will be to plunder every man in the kingdom who has a good coat on his back and a good roof over his head.51
Carlyle references the lexis of insanity, ignorance, and criminality used to manipulate the image of the Chartists as violent, deluded children. He uses the term ‘put down’, connoting both the euthanasia of animals and armed force, observing that only the ‘chimera’ has been put down, not ‘the living essence’.52 Whilst deploring the methods of armed struggle, he argues that horror of violence should not blind the public to the underly- ing causes.
the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England. […] this thing, known at present by the name Chartism does exist; has existed; and, either ‘put down,’ into secret treason, with rusty pistols, or vitriol-bottle and match-box, or openly brandishing pike and torch (one knows not in which case more fatal-looking), is like to exist till quite other methods have been tried with it. […] To say that Chartism is ‘mad, incendiary, nefarious, is no answer’. The protests are symptoms of a larger disease which, rather than its symptoms, must be abolished. They are like boils: ‘small matter which, while the viru- lent humour festers deep within; poisoning the sources of life; and certain enough to find for itself ever new boils and sore issues; ways of announcing that it continues there, that it would fain not continue there’. Rhetorical questions associate the working classes with madness, and appealing to right-thinking men, Carlyle opposes Chartist delirium and chaos with ratio- nality, common sense and order. He asks whether the condition of the English working classes is wrong or whether their discontent itself is ‘mad, like the shape it took’.
Carlyle asks if it is
‘[n]ot the condition of the working people that is wrong; but their disposi- tion, their own thoughts, beliefs and feelings that are wrong? This too were 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 269
a most grave case, little less alarming, little less complex than the former one. In this case too, where constabulary police and mere rigour of coercion seems more at home, coercion will by no means do all, coercion by itself will not even do much. If there do exist general madness of discontent, then sanity and some measure of content must be brought about again. When the thoughts of a people, in the great mass of it, have grown mad, the combined issue of that people’s workings will be a madness, an incoherency and ruin!
Though less overt a comparison between protesters and animals than the response to the fourteenth-century risings, Carlyle’s call for sympathy for the underclasses paints the radicals as uncivilised, uneducated, child-like, or bestial creatures, in need of guidance. What is needed is a ‘clear inter- pretation’ by the upper classes of:
the thought which at heart torments these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them! Something they do mean; some true thing withal, in the centre of their confused hearts,—for they are hearts created by Heaven too: to the Heaven it is clear what thing; to us not clear. Would that it were!
Given this representation of them as inarticulate and confused animals, and concomitant suggestion that they needed to be led and ruled by their betters, it was vital that Chartists should write. Though the messages of Chartist poetry were important, the act of writing itself, particularly in the valued genre of poetry, demonstrated that workers were literate and more than literate and claimed for the working classes a part in high culture. Sanders quotes from the preface to Gerald Massey’s (1828–1907) Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (1851), which attributes intellectual and aes- thetic weaknesses of his poetry to his lack of education and limited knowl- edge of canonical works, arguing that Massey assumed that the political struggle ‘required not just poetry—but the best poetry’.53 To demonstrate the capacity for symbolic representation proves worthiness of political rep- resentation. In this light, the brutal criticism of the editors of The Northern Star is more understandable,54 as is Ernest Jones’ criticism of Ebenezer Elliott’s work for overwrought repetition and indelicacy, and his assertion of the necessity for ‘democratic poets’ to ‘elevate and not endanger the dignity of the democratic character’.55 Perhaps also the willingness of Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) to tackle the complexities of the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc).56 270 S. BYRNE
A dual necessity arose, to understand and appreciate canonical poetry in order to master its forms and to produce a literature of their own. Whilst working-class readers had limited access to and ownership of canonical poetry, they did read, borrow, own, and refer to books. Milton and Shakespeare remained models as they were for eighteenth-century labouring poets. Jonathan Rose states that the plays became an alternative Bible of Humanity, an inspiration for both the education and political aspirations of many working people.57 Burns, Thomson, Blake, Shelley, and Byron were also enormously influential, and frequently appeared in editorials of newspapers such as The Northern Star, as did Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge.58 Shelley’s ‘idealism and faith in human potential were fundamental tenets among all Chartists’, and, like him, they imbued abstractions such as freedom and liberty with mythic significance, whereas Byron’s exposure of hypocrisy and folly became descriptions of greed and abused power.59 Chaloner notes the many Chartist poems influenced by Shelley’s ‘Song of the Men of England’ and The Mask of Anarchy, Byron’s balladic ‘Ode to the Framers of the Bill against Frame-Breakers’ or ‘Song for Luddites’.60 In particular, poems respond to the imperatives of The Masque of Anarchy:
Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few. (ll. 372–376)
The poem is often quoted or adapted in both prose and poetry, as in Ernest Jones’s ‘Onward’:
Oh! we have battled long and true; While you were many we were few, And stronger chains we’ve broken through: Think not your paltry silken bands Can bind Progression’s giant bands.61
Shelley’s poetry remained extremely important and influential to Chartism, but as with other works, including the Bible that in so many cases was the foundation of literacy, this was not read uncritically or expounded dog- matically, as Anne Janowizt notes.62 Differing attitudes to violence among 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 271
Chartists, for example, meant an uneasy relationship with Shelley’s pacifism.63 Among the Chartist Circular’s sketches of writers ‘illustrating the lib- eralising, all-harmonising tendency of our times’64 is Wordsworth, described as ‘the poet of humanity’ who ‘teaches reverence for our univer- sal nature’ and ‘breaks down the factious barriers between human breasts’, and praised for going to ‘common life […] to the obscure and neglected portions of society, for beautiful and touching themes’ and for not believ- ing that these needed ‘the charms of his genius, as if, in themselves, they had nothing grand or lovely’.65 One of a series of articles on the politics of poets defends Wordsworth from the label of Tory and argues that he is not only at least the equal of Milton but equally republican.66 Byron receives the highest accolades, however, and is mentioned in several issues.
Of all the poets who have directed their minds to the study of the social condition of man, none has sympathized more deeply with the sufferers, none shown a more determined spirit of resistance and retaliation to the oppressor than Byron; his noble and dignified soul scorned the idea of fattening on the ruins of his country; nor could he quietly submit, and not raise his far-heard voice against the wretches who made their own gain and their country’s ruin their study and practice. By taking the side of liberty, and of man, and presenting himself to the world as the champion of free- dom, he soon became the grand object of attack for all the apostate poets and critics of his day, whom he compelled to writhe under his resistless scourge; and whom he eclipsed by the magnificent splendour of his genius.67
Elsewhere in plebeian writing, Wordsworth is treated less hagiographi- cally. In one of a pair of articles on the poetry and politics of Pierre-Jean de Beranger, a Northern Star writer citing de Beranger’s scorn of sinecures and patronage remarks: ‘How nobly Beranger contrasts with those things Southey and Wordsworth!’68
Wordsworth has coloured similar objects [the unjust treatment of the poor] differently! True, but Wordsworth only meets his subject half-way and with his hinder-end towards it. ‘Sly is the look which o’er his back that wary poet throws.’ Crabbe, on the contrary, takes his hideous mistress in his arms, and she rewards his confidence in her by telling him her dreadful secrets.69
Other literary judgements are not always consistent. The Labourer, a peri- odical edited by Feargus O’Connor and Ernest Jones, published an 272 S. BYRNE unsigned ‘Literary Review’ in August 1847, in which Browning and ‘Tennison’ [sic] are castigated for their lack of political engagement. Browning can ‘fire the soul’ and ‘depict nature’s nobility’ is asked if he has nothing to say ‘for popular rights’.70 Tennyson is asked if he can do no more than ‘troll a courtly lay’. Both poets are subsequently claimed as examples of the increasing democratic tendency in contemporary poetry.71 Rose writes of a growing sense in the Chartist movement that ‘litera- ture was compatible with and necessary to political liberation’:
As [George] Julian Harney put it in The Red Republican, the workers needed ‘the Charter and something more.’ The propaganda of Robert Owen alone did not convert printer Thomas Frost (b.1821) to socialism: ‘The poetry of Coleridge and Shelley was stirring within me, and making me “a Chartist and something more”.’72
Rose finds a direct correlation between Samuel Bamford’s discovery of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso and his political agitation:
not because he had read any overtly political message into ‘Il Penseroso’. Milton established a habit of serious reading, which brought Bamford to Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, the great poets, classic histories and voyages, and, ultimately, William Cobbett’s Political Register. More importantly, ‘ll Penseroso’ taught Bamford to ask questions and voice his thoughts—a revolutionary transformation. Of all poets, ‘none has so fully spoken out the whole feelings of my heart—the whole scope of my imaginings, and that, Bamford concluded, is what made Milton so “fascinating and dangerous”’.73
As part of the wider enterprise of providing free or inexpensive education for workers, authors such as Thomas Cooper provided lessons in writing through, for example, the Leicester Shakespearean Chartist Association (1841–1842). Later, in his Cooper’s Journal, addressing the ‘Young men of the Working Classes’, Cooper insisted that ‘you all join hands and head to create a literature of your own. Your own prose, your own poetry: you ought to be resolved to create these.’ This would be the ‘outward and vis- ible sign’ of reading and thinking, would ‘silence the titled and privileged depreciators of your growing intelligence’, would be a means of self- culture, would give working men an understanding of each other’s thought, greater respect for one another, and, perhaps most importantly, an idea of what unity could accomplish.74 Cooper offers advice on the 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 273 composition of both prose and poetry, advising that poets should avoid over-inflation of expression and exaggerated sentimentalism and should develop knowledge of the mechanism of verse. A second article, on the best standard and school of poetry, followed in the next issue.75 The importance of wide reading to the aspirational self-educated working man (articles almost invariably refer to men) is emphasised in articles and reviews which suggest that attentive reading will lead to effective writing, of a particular kind. A biographical sketch of Gerald Massey, attributed to Samuel Smiles, later to advocate industriousness and education in his Self- Help,76 typifies this.
When the self-risen and self-educated man speaks and writes now-a-days, it is of the subjects nearest to his heart. Literature is not a mere intelligent epicurism with men who have suffered and grown wise, but a real, earnest, passionate, vehement, living thing—a power to move others, a means to elevate themselves, and to emancipate their order. This is a marked peculiar- ity of our times; knowledge is now more than ever regarded as a power to elevate, not merely individuals, but classes. Hence the most intelligent of working-men at this day are intensely political: we merely state this as a fact not to be disputed. In former times, when literature was regarded mainly in the light of a rich man’s luxury, poets who rose out of the working-class sung as their patrons wished. Bloomfield and Clare sang of the quiet beauty of rural life, and painted pictures of evening skies, purling brooks, and grassy meads. […] But come down to our own day, and mark the difference: Elliot, Nichol, Bamford, the author of ‘Ernest,’ the Chartist Epic, Davis the ‘Belfast Man,’ De Jean, Massey, and many others, are intensely political; and they defend themselves for their selection of subjects as Elliot did, when he said, ‘Poetry is impassioned truth; and why should we not utter it in the shape that touches our condition the mostly closely-the political?’ But how it hap- pens that the writings of working-men now-a-days so generally assume the political tone, will be best ascertained from the following sketch of the life of Gerald Massey.77
The Chartist attempt to communicate in poetry, the use of poetry for an overtly political purpose and making poetry accessible and affordable, can be seen in the poems published in The Northern Star and the ten-week series of articles ‘The Politics of Poets’ published in the Scottish Chartist Circular, some examples of which are given below. Just as more recently The Guardian gave Tony Harrison column inches in the news section of the paper for poems about Sarajevo, so The Northern Star moved its poetry 274 S. BYRNE section from the inside back to p. 3, opposite the editorials. Like Harrison’s declared intention of giving a voice to the voiceless, Chartist poems repre- sent the chorus of working-class people united in demanding to be heard, but these are not lines spoken on behalf of or ventriloquial of the plebiscite but are the voices of the labouring poor and radical activists. Sanders provides a table which indicates the increased number of Chartist poems published in The Northern Star during that 14-year period78 and shifts the focus of study from known ‘Labour Laureates’ such as Gerald Massey and Ernest Jones to the majority of published Chartist poets, who remained anonymous or identified by initials or by pseud- onyms, many based on occupation. Sanders notes that the number of sub- missions of poems to the Northern Star (in circulation from 18 November 1837) meant that the editor had to be selective and reject an increasing number of poems as well as to hold some back. Sanders quotes: ‘We have received as much poetry as a donkey could draw; we shall select from it as occasion offers, so let none be jealous, or we will take it by lot’,79 and, from eight months later, an address to ‘The Poets’: ‘We get rhymes of the most Rubbishly description by the score. We cannot pretend to enumerate them. We shall select, from time to time, such as we think worth publish- ing, and burn the rest.’80 A similar message appears in the first edition of 1842, again noting the abundance of poems submitted, but immediately after this the number declined. ‘This serious decline in Chartist produced poetry underlines both the fracturing of the Chartist movement by the emergence of educational, temperance and religious wings of Chartism and the defeat of the mass strikes in 1842.’81 The poems in newspapers vary enormously, but some themes and styles recur. Sanders notes the extensive use of abstractions, particularly in the anthem-like poems. These tend to be strongly nationalistic and to make rallying cries for defiance, resolution, and resistance, but without material specifics. The imperative of ‘The Commission of Genius’ is a task for ‘thought’.
Up, thought! Though hast a mighty task work— A glorious task to do82
A martial lexis is employed, and there is reference to battles within and outside living memory, including Roman wars, a common trope in Chartist poems. 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 275
A wider field than Waterloo Hast thou wherein to war; ’Gainst fiercer foes than Caesar knew, Or Russia’s daring Csar.
The fight, however, is not physical:
Thou hast no need of spear or sword, Nor shield nor helmet bright, Nor quiver, with sharp arrows stored To fit thee for the fight The call is to pull down oppression To humble haughty pride— To snatch from vice her jewell’d crown, And dash her slaves aside
The abstract challenges include to ‘open freedoms portals wide’, to throw over ‘stubborn error’ the ‘startling light’ of ‘truth’, and to advance through the ‘thick and lampless night/Of ignorance’. This poem comes closer than some in directing specific action, but the imperatives remain generic, returning to the Roman imagery of empire and senates. The addressees are to stand ‘unfaltering’ before the ‘thrones of mighty kings’ and to ‘thunder in the ear’ of ‘senates’ that corrupt states are unfit to share government. Archaisms and Biblical language invest the enterprise with divine approval:
Arise! go forth! for, lo, a curse Rests both on thee and thine, Darker, and deadlier, and worse Than erst was Lamoch’s sign. Go forth! thine errand is divine; Refuse, and thus ’tis given; Thou art a traitor most malign— A renegade to heaven!
Though the Chartist newspapers provide stories from Roman history and praise Roman virtues, the forms of Chartist poetry look back less far than the registers of Augustanism, to Romanticism and Sensibility. Many poems contrast the conditions of mill and factory with an idealised pastoral in which the speaker would find beauty and ease. As Isobel Armstrong notes, 276 S. BYRNE pastoral is a retreat but measures the real world against its conventions, so that the serenity of nature marks the dehumanisation of mechanistic indus- tr y. 83 These poems depict the imagined better life and all that the speaker does not have, at the expense of the description of the current life, for example, ‘The Toiler’s Dream’, a poem by a Seamstress,84 whose first two stanzas and much of the last dwell on what might have been.
Sat in the laughing bowers, Where, by green twining elms, a pleasant shade, At summer’s noon is made [....]
Not on the couch of ease, With all the appliances of joy at hand— Soft light, sweet fragrance, beauty at command; Viands that might a god-like palate please, And music’s soul-creating ecstacies, Dream I. Nor gloating o’er a wide estate
Like some of the plebeian poetry of the eighteenth century, Chartist writ- ing employs Georgic and pastoral tropes, seemingly from the ground up rather than from the elevated view of the contemplative non-labouring poet. Rather than representing the picturesque landscape as a site of con- templation and meditation, however, Chartist poetry depicts the pastoral as a dreamscape, an Eden from which the speaker is excluded, or is at best a visitor, and that speaker, though solitary and marginalised, is synecdochal of a collective. It should be remembered that silent reading entails a choice between companionship and reading, so the solitude described in these poems would have been familiar to the self-educated poet, even if the soli- tude was achieved in a crowded room.85 The landscapes described often evoke an image of an idealised Britain, a country evoked in poetic rallying calls demanding that the nation unite to bring back a lost state of freedom, blending more generalised patriotism with Chartist aims, as though working-class solidarity and unity equated with national unity. Massey’s ‘Our Land’ calls on contemporary radicals to be as brave and stalwart as past generations who lived and died for the land and to join them in the ahistorical repository that is the land.
Tis the land our stalwart fore-sires trode Where the brave and heroic-souled— Gave freedom baptism of their best blood, 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 277
In the martyr-days of old! [….] our dear old land, With its memories bright and brave! And Sing O! for the hour its sons shall band, To free it of despot and slave.
Cromwell is of us! and Shakespeare’s thought Be—kings us all crowns above! And freedom’s faith fierce splendours caught, From our grand old Milton’s love!86
The use of the plural first-person pronoun in many Chartist anthems and poems emphasises the communitarian87 aspect of the poems, establishing an identity based on what we might call class consciousness from a dispa- rate group of people who might have self-defined as mill workers, factory workers, shoe-makers, labourers, tailors, seamstresses, and so on. Some poems use generalising and internationalist tropes of down- trodden masses called to action, for example, Massey’s ‘Our Symbol’,88 others more localised microcosms such as the starving child, the grieving mother, and the industrious workman unable to earn a living. The social- ity of ‘we’ regards a mutually defining ‘them’ often represented as a force or barrier, or allegory (see below) and more rarely as named individuals. Poems responding to actual events such as the crushing of the South Wales Chartists’ Newport rising in 1839 are often indirect, employing historical analogies, allegories, and biblical allusion.89 Sanders notes the delay between the events of the rising and the publication of more direct and extensive engagement such as the nine ‘Sonnets Devoted to Chartism’ by ‘Iota’, noting the problem for newspapers such as The Northern Star of seeming to call for action by force.90 The Chartist Circular91 was established a year after The Northern Star, by the Universal Suffrage Central Committee for Scotland. Smaller and cheaper, at 4pp for 1/2d, it did not carry news and so could be unstamped and focused on advertising the principles of Chartism and promoting uni- versal male suffrage. It was popular, having a circulation of 20–22,500 copies a week in 1839 but short-lived, ceasing publication in July 1842. It appeared in volume form in 1851. Like The Northern Star, it included poems, many of them in the same allegorical or hymn-like style as those in the other newspapers. David Wright’s (dates unknown) ‘The Working Bee’ compares working men to worker bees and ‘the sons of ease’ to 278 S. BYRNE drones but states that the workers can turn the drones out of doors. It calls on labourers to do likewise.
Come then, arise—for once be wise, And imitate the bees; And all unite in Freedom’s fight, And spoil the sons of bees.92
‘Ode to Labour’ by ‘An Industrious Englishman’ glorifies and unites both agricultural and industrial labour and thus labourers as working with nature’s bounty and against its obstacles, as the producers of all nourish- ment and goods.
Hail labour! source thro’ bounteous Nature’s aid Of ev’ry blessing which sustains mankind!— Yay! Nature’s frowns thy power hath so allay’d, That man thro’ life may scarce an evil find From sultry sun or piercing wintry wind.93
The products of labour are enumerated: from food, engineering, ships, to coal and carriages, but these have been usurped by ‘parchment deeds’ and wrested from labourers by the tools of war that they have made. The ‘ingrate offspring, “Capital”’ who should succour labour now:
‘[d]oth madly join all those who’d thee defame.’ The expected call to reverse this comes in the penultimate and final stanzas, but the poem exhibits the Chartist ambiguity about force. Workers have for too long tamely borne the bitter taunt ‘[o]f those who’ve wanton’d in the wealth thou’st reared’. Now, a ‘happy change’, the workers’ arms are raised, and feared.
But tho’ thy arm’s in giant strength erect, As infants,’ harmless, thou its power will wield; Thy sacred rights thou’lt grasp—each wrong correct, Then act with mercy—not to vengeance yield:— Wisdom and worth thou’lt succour—weakness shield.
The raised arm here is synecdochal of labourers’ bodily strength and indicative of their demanding to be noticed; nonetheless, the collocation of ‘feared’, ‘power’, and ‘grasp’, and the other meaning of ‘arms’, weap- ons, underlie the lines, working against the pacifistic closing sentiment. 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 279
The ‘Ode to Tyrants’ published a few weeks later makes no call to action or arms but uses a semi-comic tone, representing the oppositions of rich and poor, landed and unlanded, high and low through analogies which awaken one side of that binary to the ridiculousness of it. The tyrants command:
“Behold your GODS!—down, rascals, on your knees; “Your money, miscreants—quick, no words, no strife; “Your lands, too—scoundrels, vermin, lice, bugs, fleas; “And thank our mercy that allows you life!”
Humorous lines representing the ludicrousness of a tailor bowing idol- atrously to the breeches he had made are followed by a punchy couplet ending the abab rhyme-scheme:
Who would not quick exclaim, ‘The Tailor’s mad?’ Yet TYRANT ADORATION is as bad.94
The Poor Law and Poor Pay The Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1834 was opposed not only by the poor and the radical press but also by a number of disparate groups (Gertrude Himmelfarb finds at least 20).95 Opposers such as the Tory Radical Richard Oastler (1789–1861) campaigned vigorously in newspaper, pamphlets, and broadsheets and on the streets.96 Not all opposed it on humanitarian grounds, however. The common denominator between those disparate groups, David Ashforth asserts, was an ‘intense dislike of centralisation’. What they opposed was the power of ‘three Big Wigs in London’.97 Felix Driver states that the ‘revolution in Poor Law government was often repre- sented by anti-Poor Law campaigners as an encroachment into previously autonomous areas of rural life’.98 This amendment of the Tudor Poor Laws sought to prevent the ‘idle’ and ‘fraudulent’ from claiming assistance, and to require that those who did claim were truly destitute. Recipients of relief were to be kept under strict discipline and made to work in order to make workhouses unattractive to any but the utterly destitute.
It is true that nothing is necessary to arrest the progress of pauperism, except that all who receive relief from the parish should work for the parish exclu- sively, as hard and for less wages than independent labourers work for indi- vidual employers. […] with regard to the able-bodied, the remedy set forth in the statute is to make the indolent industrious.99 280 S. BYRNE
The commissioners admit that ‘able-bodied persons in the receipt of out- door allowance and partial relief, may be, and in some cases are, placed in a condition less eligible than that of the independent labourer or the low- est class’, but they argue that ‘to persons so situated, relief in a well- regulated workhouse would not be a hardship: and even if it be, in some rare cases, a hardship, it appears from the evidence a hardship to which the good of society requires the applicant to submit’.100 Anyone who applies to a workhouse is assumed to be stating that he or she is ‘in danger of perishing from want’. Any request ‘to be rescued from that danger out of the property of others’ entails acceptance of assistance ‘on the terms, whatever they may be, which the common welfare requires’. It is proposed to return to the spirit of the earlier Tudor Poor Laws and to remove the temptation of fraudulent claims for assistance which have been afforded by, among other things, ‘the absence of the check of shame, owing to the want of a broad line of distinction between the class of independent labourers and the class of paupers, and the degradation of the former by confounding them with the latter’. It is stated that ‘it is demoralising and ruinous to offer to the able-bodied of the best characters more than a simple subsistence’.101 However, if the regulations are enforced with a degree of strictness, no one not destitute would willingly enter the workhouse. David Englander comments on this ‘officially-encouraged stigma’ that pauperism was ‘a form of degradation and disgrace. To apply for relief was a cause for self-reproach and private humiliation; to enter the workhouse was a public admission of personal and moral failure. The authorities did everything to make it so’.102 As machines replaced workers in some manufactories, some manufacto- ries laid off workers, and more intervening steps came between the work- ers who produced and the consumers who purchased commodities, so wages declined, in some cases to below subsistence level, but the work- house was a dreaded alternative to be avoided if humanly possible. Mary Hutton, ‘On the Poor Law’s Amendment Bill’,103 tells Charity to return to heaven:
Hear not, sweet maid, the universal cry, Our rulers say, that half the poor must die. (ll. 17–26)
Like a number of plebeian poets, Hutton compares the present economic system unfavourably to feudalism and the lot of the labourer with the slave. 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 281
Ye golden days of plenty, war, and pain, When men were sold at their proud lord’s command, As part and parcel of their master’s land. ’Twere better far to live a tyrant’s slave, Than pine through want into an early grave. In feudal times blest was the peasant’s lot, Then plenty smiled upon his humble cot; He knew no throbs of agonizing pain, No ghastly want with all its frightful train. (ll. 56–67)
Hutton argues that the bond peasant’s lot was better than that of the modern poor because the peasant could hope for a good outcome, a good harvest from their industry, that important word.
If bounteous heaven but crown’d his life with health; He envied not the pamper’d sons of wealth; For then his industry was sure to bring The blessings of a fair and smiling spring. (ll. 72–75)
Hutton’s poem is too early for her comment about half the poor being killed to be a reference to the infamous theory of ‘Marcus’. The two-part pamphlet An Essay on Populousness and On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness was printed for private circulation in 1838. In a revisiting of Jonathan Swift’s satirical Modest Proposal, it not only supports Malthusian economic principles but also prescribes eugenics as a way of limiting the number of the poor.104 The argument is partly based on the concept of property—whether or not the child has property rights over its life and body105—and on a theory of ‘painless extinction’ (stifling).106 Among the rewards for permitting the third or subsequent child to be killed is a privi- leged burial.
Thus of the unreared infant there will have been preserved some record: from it will someone have received an inheritance […] let there be a burial- ground—call it rather a repository, for the privileged remains of these infants unadmitted into life. Let it have nothing funereal about it, but all that is cheerful and agreeable.107
The pamphlet was much attacked and withdrawn from circulation, but ‘Marcus’ had become an emblem of oppression and writers against the poor laws more generally used the term ‘Anti-Marcus’.108 The pamphlet 282 S. BYRNE was later reprinted in the satirical The Book of Murder: A vade Mecum for the Commissioners and Guardians of the New Poor Law. Linton’s attack on the new Poor Laws was in the form of a mock-epic in loose iambic tetrameter couplets, Bob Thin, or the Poorhouse Fugitive,109 which begins in the days before the Elizabethan Poor Law, traces the decline of a family from relative prosperity through industry, to unemploy- ment, poverty, the abuses of the workhouse, and death, and ends on the hero’s escape to a Utopian afterlife.110 The poem mixes the grotesque, the folk tale, and the fantasy with detailed realism:
Alas, the poor man pleads in vain. Christian Respectability Just gives out of its charity A cold, ‘Lay by for a rainy day’; And Poor-law medicine say, Outdoor relief induces fraud, Except when granted to a lord. And spoils the incentive to endeavour In all but the gentleman-receiver, Poor reasons why the innocent From their own hearth-stones should be sent, To a cold workhouse! yet no better Were given in the Bishop’s letter. In Camden Gardens, Bethnal-green, Bob’s homestead was, not over clean, Nor in the most healthy atmosphere; Lying unfortunately near To Lamb’s fields’s marsh, a stagnant pool, Of some three hundred square feet full, Of the spawn of dire contagion, which Dwelt rankly there and in a ditch. (ll. 196–216)
The Dorset poet William Barnes (1801–1886) also directly attacks the new Poor Law in more formal iambic tetrameter couplets of the Rights of the Necessitous.111 Without satiric humour but with considerable passion, the poem presents inequality as a crime against the law of God, which presented the fertile earth and its fruits to all, and that we are enjoined to share and to relieve the needy.
But now the rich men of the land Oppress the poor with iron hand, 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 283
Condemn them to incessant toil, Then seize the produce as their spoil; And e’en starvation would entail Should age draw on, or labour fail, The charge is false! (some here will cry), The Law forbids the Poor to die, And points to a specific aid Which for the destitute is made. But let me first this question state: During the Poor-law Act debate, Did not is base projectors mention This, as their ultimate intention, That all relief they would deny? Then of course the poor must die. (ll. 37–52)
Barnes’s note to these lines refers to comments made by Fitzwilliam and Broughton denouncing charity, including hospitals and almshouses, as encouraging idleness. The poem combines Biblical example with legal dis- course, using terms such as ‘own’, ‘sharers’, ‘principle’, ‘right’, ‘stake’ and ‘lawyer’ to argue for the validity of Barnes’ claim, and Sir Willian Blackstock is cited as a legal authority for the common ownership of land.
Because it has been fairly shown, The Land’s but partially their own; Holding it as they really should As sharers in a general good; (ll. 329–322) So says each Lawyer too of note, By far too numerous to quote: But just for satisfaction’s sake One passage we from Blackstone take (Excuse the making of him rhyme). He says, There never was a time In England, when the laws of man Made private property of Land, Which did not at the same time give A common right to All to live; From th’Land to claim a full supply The wants of life to satisfy. (ll. 367–378)
This harks back to the ideas of Thomas Spence, whose land plan sought to redistribute equitably agricultural land and advocated the ‘people’s farm’ 284 S. BYRNE principle, and to earlier poetry on Spencean lines. ‘Nature’s First, Last and Only Will, or A Hint to Mr Bull’ conjoins Biblical and legal registers to assert natural communal rights which have been stolen by ‘a lawless and marauding band/Of despots’ led by the ‘artful wiles’ of ‘priestmen’.112
When Nature her pure artless reign began, She gave in entail all her stores to man; The earth, the waters, eke the air and light, And mines and springs, men held in equal right For ever. The probate of her will declares, Her boundless bounty framed in equal shares
Both radicals and conservatives used Biblical discourse in support of their respective cases. The Dudley Archives include a poster in the Samuel Cook Broadsides which announces ‘The Bible is the Best Political Book in the World!’ and exhorts readers ‘When you read the Bible or hear it read in churches or chapels, attend to its politics!’113 The image of a loving or even vengeful God arising to save the poor appears in some poems, such as Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), ‘God Help the Poor’. In all but its final stanza, the poem uses the conventional phrase ‘God help’ as a refrain sig- nifying only that the poor need help and will get none, but in the final stanza there is a confident assertion that ‘God will yet arise and HELP THE POOR!’114 Little help seems to be expected from priests of God. The anti-clerical Cooper115 does not deny the existence of God in his The Purgatory of Suicides, dedicated to Carlyle, though by stanza xx of Book III he admits to finding ‘Daily new grounds to doubt the mythic dress’ (III: l. 174); faith is distinguished from the practices and hierarchies of organised religion.116 The poem references Christ’s feeding and teaching of the poor (I: l. 29) but also that the ‘priests proclaim [the poor] content’ (I: l. 28) and refers to ‘the purple prelate’ who rides in pomp (I: l. 40) and calls for retribution:
till ye end the game Long practised by sleek priests in old Religion’s name. (I: ll. 44–45)
Whilst professing love of Christ, he hedges his words with conditionals:
I love the Galilean:—Lord and Christ Such goodness I could own; and though enshrined 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 285
In flesh could worship: if enparadised, Beyond the grave, no Eden I could find Restored, though all the good of humankind Were there and not that yearning One—the Poor Who healed, and fed, and blest! Nay, to my mind, Hell would be Heaven with him! horror no more Could fright,—if such benignant beauty trod its shore. (III: ll. 187–195)
And further doubt follows:
I love the sweet and simple narrative,— With all its childlike earnestness,—the page Quadruple where those love-wrought wonders live: I would the tale were true: that heritage Of immortality it doth presage Would make me glad indeed: but doubts becloud Truth’s fountains as their depths I seek to gauge,— Till with this trustless reck’ning I am bowed,— Man’s heritage is but a cradle and a shroud!—(III: ll. 196–204)
Because the poem was composed during Cooper’s more than two years’ imprisonment for sedition in Stafford gaol, and features the narrator’s visions from his prison cell, it invites comparisons with The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly in its description of journeys (e.g. over the sea of death to a dismal land in stanzas xvii to xxii) and its personifications such as the giant Wrong (l. 104), but the vision is more Dantesque, as sug- gested by the title, in its grotesque imagery. The theme of the poem is not the attainment of the Christian telos, the Celestial City, however, but the attainment of knowledge, wrested from its guards, priests (VI: cxxv), par- ticularly Catholic priests (VIII: viii, l. 8).117 Cooper’s subsequent long poem in the same form, The Paradise of Martyrs, offers a somewhat more conventional Christian outlook. Loose regards this and Cooper’s own changes of faith, as symptomatic of para- doxes and ambiguities in the Chartist movement, whose members included free thinkers and dissenters as well as members of the established church.118 Unsurprisingly many poems represent the ravages of industry on the children of workers and the child labourer. Critchley Prince’s ‘The Death of Factory Child’ is the apotheosis of the suffering angel-child but itself shows no resignation or acceptance. 286 S. BYRNE
Here sleep the relics of an orphan flower, Crush’d by the brutal foot of lawless pow’r; Another victim to the thousands slain Within the mighty slaughter-house of gain. The poem calls on philanthropists who might have an interest in the people to pause on the grave of this ‘infant-martyr’. Swear to emancipate the British slave; Tell the oppressor, that the widow’s God, In justice, wields an all-avenging rod. And if the pow’rs of human virtue fail, The hand of heaven will certainly prevail!119
Similar are Michael Thomas Sadler (1780–1835), ‘The Factory Child’s Last Day’, which was included in Richard Oastler’s Fleet Papers120; John Nicholson (1790–1843), The Factory-Child, A Poem and The Factory- Child’s Mother; and James Ross (dates unknown), The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply to the Factory Child’s Mother.121 The term ‘Factory Child’ itself became iconic in the cause of reform, for example, in letters such as that from the Revd George Stringer Bull to John Stuart Wortley in which Bull says that he has taken up the cause of the ‘Factory Child, and for its over-laboured and under-paid Parent’.122 Critical response to the publication of the work of plebeian or self- taught poets ranged from indifference to patronising. An 1831 review of Southey’s edited edition of John Jones’ poets and The Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets regards Southey’s enterprise as of no advantage to Southey in appearing ‘as the Maecenas to so humble a poetaster’, and remarks that many would have ‘feared to incur a compro- mise of their dignity by such a step’.123 The journal’s notice of the poems is due to their editor, not the poems. Whilst taking to task Southey for deploring education for the poor as a drawback to poetry, and for regard- ing poetry as inculcating moral lessons, the review dismisses most plebeian poets of the last two centuries and expects little from future publications. ‘Experience does not authorize us to regard it as probable, that the world will be favoured with any poetry of very exalted merit from persons in humble life and defective education.’124 Although examples can be found of the uneducated poor having a capacity ‘or native genius’ for sci- ence, mechanics, languages, and other subjects, ‘poetry is not equally rich in examples of votaries from the ranks of the poor’. The piece concludes with the hope that Southey will ‘look with favour on the mental labours of 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 287 the poorer classes’ but that rather than ‘lure them into the flowery region of poetry’ he will ‘teach them to cultivate pursuits which are more in har- mony with their daily habits, and to prefer the useful to the ornamental’.125 For Maidment, ‘the most significant account of the phenomenon of self-taught working-class authors’ is Carlyle’s review of Ebenezer Elliott’s Corn-Law Rhymes in the Edinburgh Review.126 Carlyle observes that ‘[i]t used to be said that lions do not paint, that poor men do not write; but the case is altering now’; welcomes ‘an intelligible voice from the hitherto Mute and Irrational, to tell us at first hand how it is with him, what in very deed is the theorem of the world and of himself’; and insists ‘[t]o which voice, in several respects significant enough, let good ear be given’, since ‘[g]enius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex, is much more certainly of no rank’.127 Whereas Maidment sees Carlyle as unable or unwilling to resolve the paradox of Elliott’s ‘disconcerting honesty and unpolished naïve indignation’, Marcus Waithe sees the article as indicative of Carlyle’s desire to reconcile literature and work, and his own sense of lacking a ‘voice of labour’ equivalent to that of Elliott, even though Elliott’s labouring-class credentials were no stronger than his own.128 Waithe makes a useful point about the credentials of plebeian poetry in saying that Carlyle sought to ‘clothe Elliott in the garb of a workingman, whose poetry was hammered out at the forge’, reserving thereby ‘the pos- sibility of a manually-inflected art, operating at a safe distance from Grub Street’. In contrast, Maidment finds George Gilfillan’s piece on the same poet from his A Gallery of Literary Portraits of 1845 ‘an extraordinary exercise in feverish rhetoric, in which the author’s exaggerated jocularity gave way to peevish hostility and bluster’.129 Gilfillan cannot see past the poet’s background in manual labour (though Elliott had by this time retired from a Sheffield iron foundry and was relatively well-off) to read the poems, nor his seeming sense of the presumptuousness of a working man’s daring to stand for his class, or writing at all.
And yet the forge had wrought and raged for ages, and amid all its fiery products reared no poets until it was said ‘Let Ebenezer Elliott be’. And though he stood forward somewhat ostentatiously as the self-chosen deputy to Parnassus of the entire manufacturing class, it is easy to find in the large rough grasp of his intellect […] in the untameable fire of his uneven yet nervous line, in his impatient and contemptuous use of language, traces of 288 S. BYRNE
the special trade over which he long presided […] of the savage power which taught him at one time to wield the hammer and the pen with little differ- ence in degree of animal exertion and mental fury.130
Gilfillan cannot eradicate the image of Elliott as ‘a grim son of the furnace’ wrestling with unfamiliar language and beating it into submission as he would iron; everything is large, heavy, and laboured, even his quill nib is ‘broad’; he ‘leans, labours, growls and curses’. Maidment states that the interest of middle-class readers and reviewers was primarily in the lives rather than the writing of self-taught poets and that they were read as an aspect of political and social development.131 Middle-class authors did, however, produce social problem or condition of England poetry, as well as fiction. The most famous of these is probably Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’.132 Alvin Whitley describes a court case whose report in The Times of 26 October 1843 is said to have inspired Hood, a case against ‘a wretched-looking woman’ known only as Biddell or Bedel, ‘with a squalid, half-starved infant at her breast’, who was charged with illegally pawning trousers that she was making up for a slopseller, Henry Moses.133 Biddell had pawned the cloth in order to buy ‘dry bread’ for herself and her two children. She reported that she was paid only 7d for each pair of trousers made, and had been working night and day in an effort to avoid the poorhouse, to which the court now sent her (rather than to prison). After this case, a contractor or middle-woman to a slopseller came to the court to ask for the arrest of piece worker who had also pawned garments, shirts. The next day, The Times, as part of its campaign against exploitative sweated labour and the new Poor Law, ran a leader referring to the case, and an article, ‘The White Slaves of London’, and subsequently published a reader’s letter which angrily denounced the practice. Moses also wrote to The Times, defending himself on the basis that his sale price for the trousers is 7/6, giving him a profit of only 5–7.5%.134 He asserts that he has no part in the diminishing of wages but that a competitive market, particularly competition from workhouses, which pay only 1d for three shirts, is so fierce that he has to sell his gar- ments as cheaply as possible. The Times responds that Moses may be more liberal than other slopsellers but merely saying that he is less culpable doesn’t make him innocent. Whitley argues that Hood conflated the cases, taking the low pay and solitary work late into the night from the first and the shirts from the second. ‘The Song of the Shirt’ was published in Punch (14 December 1843) and The Times two days later, and taken up by other 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 289 newspapers as well as printed as a broadsheet and, ironically, as Whitley comments, on cotton handkerchiefs. It also became a popular song. These were far from isolated cases. The Northern Star describes another case against a shirt-maker, Mary White, the following month, in a report of several cases of injustice under the regular heading ‘The Condition of England Question’ with the epigraph ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law!’135 The seamstress is said to have been paid 11/2d for each shirt made by Harriet Davis, another slopsellers’ intermediary, who has brought the charges against Mary White. The report lists a number of benefactors (by initials and pseudonym) who, following the publicity received by the trial, have contributed sums for Mary White’s relief, and that Harriet Davis, once determined to press charges, has dropped them. The seamstress of ‘The Song of the Shirt’ is represented synecdochally in the same way as the shirt she sews. She is fingers, eyes, and eyelids (ll. 1–22 ff), brain (l. 18), and shadow (l. 47); it is seam, gusset, and band (l. 21 ff). She is further identified with the garment and the industry in her statement that men wear out not shirts but the lives of those who make them (ll. 27–28). That she is in ‘unwomanly rags’ whilst stitching at a shirt which would cover her outrages Victorian ideals of modesty and feminin- ity. Hood appeals not only to the reader’s pity for the exhausted and hun- gry woman who stoically refuses the relief of tears but works on (ll. 73–80) but also to the fear that poverty and incessant work could make the poor reject the doctrine of Christ’s compassion, thus religion, and thus principles.
It’s Oh! to be a slave Along with the barbarous Turk, Where woman has never a soul to save, If this is Christian work! (ll. 13–16)
That fear is stoked in ‘The Lay of the Labourer’.136 He wishes only for work, represented again synecdochally by the tools of the trades he would be willing and able to take up: spade, rake, hoe, pickaxe, bill, hook, scythe, or flail (ll. 1–4). Desperate to avoid the workhouse and consequent separa- tion of his family, the labourer pleads only for work, any kind of work. He is not a radical rick-burner and says that he will leave restitution to God, yet as he contemplates his hungry children, his protestations of honesty become an equation: give me work and you need not fear I’ll turn to crime, and perhaps a threat. 290 S. BYRNE
Ay, only give me work, And then you need not fear That I shall snare his worship’s hare, Or kill his Grace’s deer. (ll. 41–44)
The crimes which the auditor need not fear escalate to theft and armed robbery (ll. 45–48), and though the poem diverts from crime to reiterated assertions of willingness to undertake any labour, and determination to avoid mendicancy or the workhouse, it ends with a prediction of a final wearing out of stoic patience and conscience along with strength. It cries woe to anyone who begrudges fair pay or docks ‘labour’s little mite’, or
Who does their pay begrudge! Who every weekly score Docks labour’s little mite, Bestows on the poor at the temple door, But robbed them overnight. The very shilling he hoped to save As health and morals fail Shall visit me in the new Bastille The Spital or in Gaol! (ll. 87–96)
Another case taken up by The Times also became a poem by Hood. This was the trial for murder of Mary Furley, who left a workhouse, alleging ill treatment of one of her two children, and tried to support herself, first by sewing shirts at the rate of one penny, three farthings each. Failing, she threw herself and her youngest child into the Regent’s Canal. She was res- cued but the child died, and she was sentenced to death. Following two Times leaders and subsequent public outcry, the sentence was commuted to seven years’ transportation. Hood’s ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ was published in Hood’s Magazine in May 1844. Whitely notes that Hood altered the details of the case for romantic pathos: the Regent’s Canal becomes the Thames and a younger, fairer, and childless woman throws herself off Waterloo Bridge. Hood’s ‘The Pauper’s Christmas Carol’137 is reminiscent of Duck’s ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ in describing a brief respite from misery. The inmates of a workhouse receive a treat in the form of extra food at Christmas (soon to be banned by the Poor Law Amendment) but the next day are outside that chain and must contemplate a return to toil, ‘diet scant and usage rough’. For one day they are part of ‘Nature’s social chain’, just as the threshers feel part of the commonwealth of the farm 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 291 when the master drinks with them, but this is illusory. So removed from ordinary life and autonomy, the demoralised and beaten-down pauper ‘hardly knows’ the cost or the worth of things, or himself:
But are raisins high or low, Flour and suet cheap or dear? (ll. 15–16)
He ‘hardly knows’ and is unsure whether to be grateful or regretful for the painful contrast.
Ought not I to bless my stars, Warden, clerk and overseer? (ll. 23–24)
He does not know whether he will survive until the following Christmas treat.
But shall I ever dine again? Or see another feast appear? Heigh ho I only know— Christmas comes but once a year. (ll. 41–45)
Dickens’s ‘Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers’, published in The Daily News, which he had founded in January 1846, takes its subject from a speech by Lucy Simpkins to a meeting of agricultural labourers’ wives in favour of free trade.138 The poem is prefaced by a quotation from the speech, written in (presumably) imitation of the speaker’s working-class Wiltshire accent: ‘Don’t you all think that we have a great need to Cry to our God to put it in the hearts of our greassous Queen and her members of Parlerment to grant us free bread!’ Like many social problem texts, the poem relies on affect, especially feeling for children, but Dickens also, like Hood, warns of the effect of deprivation on faith:
Oh God, teach them to feel how we, When our poor infants droop, Are weakened in our trust in Thee, And how our spirits stoop; (ll. 16–19) 292 S. BYRNE
It reminds readers that it is their Christian duty to give alms to the poor, as Christ did:
Oh God, remind them of His sweet Compassion for the poor (ll. 37–38)
There is no mention of free trade, the labourers’ actual needs or demands, or any concrete specifics; the register is that of a hymn, the cry for pity. Actual hymns are printed in The Northern Star and elsewhere and were used at Chartist meetings. Unsurprisingly, given the confluence of religious and political discourse in Chartist poetry, and the importance of hymns in Victorian culture, Chartist hymnals emerged, few of which have survived.139 Dickens wrote three satirical poems for the Examiner, published as by ‘W’, including ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’.140 Though Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster, then Literary Editor, later Editor of the Examiner, ‘By Jove, how Radical I am getting’,141 the poem is given a comic flavour by the form, iambic heptameter quatrains rhyming aaaa fol- lowed by shorter-line (9 and 6 syllables) unrhymed couplet refrains.
The brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And every English peasant had his good old English spies, To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies, Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop their peevish cries. In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again!
Like Hood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in ‘The Cry of the Children’, first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1843, uses repetition to mimic the dizzying effect of repetitive mechanised labour.142 Her child labourers become part of the machines as, through the day,
the wheels are droning, turning,— Their wind comes in our faces,— Till our hearts turn,—our head, with pulses burning, And the walls turn in their places. Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling, Turns the long light that drops adown the wall, Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, All are turning, all the day, and we with all. (ll. 77–84) 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 293
Again, the exploited and wretched poor doubt the existence of heav- enly goodness.
Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers, To look up to Him and pray; So the blessed One who blesseth all the others, Will bless them another day. They answer, “Who is God that He should hear us, While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred? (ll. 101–106)
Since no one answers the children’s cries, how should they believe in God or angels? The poem becomes more daring when the children remark that they have been taught that their master is made in the image of God.
And they tell us, of His image is the master Who commands us to work on. (ll. 127–128)
Barrett Browning’s poem, written in response to the report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment, was one among many responses by middle-class poets to reports on the working and living conditions of the poor. Another poetic response to the new Poor Laws came from Ellis Spencer Groves, a surgeon, who published verse ‘dramatic sketches’ of The New Poor Law, as Administered by Guardians, or Reality and Fiction, iden- tified by a Surgeon.143
The Second Reform Act144 The response to the Second Reform Bill can be seen in Coventry Patmore’s (1823–1896) poem ‘1867’,145 which depicts the outcome rather than as further enfranchising working men, disenfranchising those who previously had political power. The poem uncompromisingly begins, ‘In the year of the great crime’, and a footnote to the fourth edition explains that this was the year when ‘the middle and upper classes were disenfranchised by Mr Disraeli’s Government, and the final destruction of the liberties of England by the act of 1884 were made inevitable’. The argument of the poem is that
false English Nobles and their Jew [Disraeli] By God demented, slew The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong. (ll. 2–4) 294 S. BYRNE and that though one person asked the poet for a song that would renew the almost mythic time of England’s past prime, this may not revive the fading glory. The poem addresses the ‘Best’, the ‘swans’ of nobility as opposed to the ‘daws’ of commoners:
Ye outlawed Best who yet are bright With the sunken light, Whose common style Is Virtue at her gracious ease, The flower of olden sanctities. Ye haply trust, by love’s benignant guile, To lure the dark and selfish brood To their own hated good. (ll. 23–30)
Their right to reign and remain ‘in the sky’ (ll. 35–36) is strongly endorsed by the poem, and it is lamented that this has been revoked:
the sordid Trader caught The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught, And soon, to the Mechanic vain, Sold the proud Toy for nought. (ll. 37–40)
They are enjoined to work and pray in order to win:
A term to God’s indignant mood And the orgies of the multitude, Which now begin. (ll. 58–60)
It is worth quoting fairly extensively from prose to show the extent to which the poems accord with other political writing. Carlyle’s Shooting Niagara: And After? (1867) is scarcely less pessimistic about the conse- quences of the ‘Count of heads’ mode of democracy.146 The reform seems ‘inexpressibly delirious’ the ‘calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of emending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article’ (pp. 10–11). Carlyle writes of the aristocracy in similar vein to Patmore, arguing that it is not disliked by any class, but is looked up to. His vote is that it should continue, since, ‘from Plebs to Princeps, there was still no Class among us intrinsically so valuable and recommendable’ (p. 18). The English nobleman is said to have retained his chivalric quali- 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 295 ties, particularly politesse, ‘an immense endowment’ without which no king can rule, and which none but potential kings possess (p. 21). The lower classes, however, lack these qualities that are required to decide and rule. There is nothing but vulgarity in their desires and resolutions.
Certain it is, there is nothing but vulgarity in our People’s expectations, resolutions or desires, in this Epoch. It is all a peaceable mouldering or tum- bling down from mere rottenness and decay; whether slowly mouldering or rapidly tumbling, there will be nothing found of real or true in the rubbish- heap, but a most true desire of making money easily, and of eating it pleas- antly. A poor ideal for ‘reformers’, sure enough. But it is the fruit of long antecedents, too; and from of old our habits in regard to ‘re-formation, or repairing what went wrong (as something is always doing), have been strangely didactic. (p. 22)
Strangely echoing Richard II, Carlyle continues that such a population will be no help in reconstructing the ‘wreck’ following the Niagara plunge of universal suffrage, and that they:
‘with whatever cry of ‘liberty’ in their mouths, are inexorably marked by Destiny as slaves; and not even the immortal gods could make them free, except by making them anew and on a different pattern.’ The whole of Britain’s hope depends upon ‘the noble Few, who we always trust will be born to us, generation after generation; and on whom and whose living of a noble and valiantly cosmic life amid the worst impediments and hugest anar- chies, the whole of our hope depends.’ (pp. 23–24)
The continuance of the aristocrat, whether by patent or nature, then, is vital. Carlyle does not doubt that there are ‘still precious possibilities among the chosen of that class’ but of those fail, ‘there is still, we hope, the unclassed Aristocracy by nature, not inconsiderable in numbers, and supreme in fac- ulty, in wisdom, human talent, nobleness and courage “who derive their patent of nobility direct from Almighty God”. If the aristocracy fail, then ‘nothing else lies ahead for our once heroic England too’ (p. 24).
Plenty of voices were raised against Carlyle’s diatribe. Erin Farley provides a note about a poem performed by Frank Hill at a branch meeting of the National Reform League on 26 October 1867.
Described as ‘a stump speech after the manner of music hall orators,’ Hill appeared on stage ‘in the character of Minerva’. […] The Mr Shearer 296 S. BYRNE
addressed in the verse was the Aberdeen Branch president. This verse was not written to directly advance the cause of reform itself. Rather, it was part of the social culture of the reform movement, and was intended for an audi- ence of campaigners. As such, it is less of a polemic and more of a light- hearted satire on the political scene in Britain and in Aberdeen itself, mixing references to local developments concerning the harbour with references to national news, like Thomas Carlyle’s anti-household suffrage essay ‘Shooting Niagara,’ published earlier that year.147
TEA! TEA!! TEA!!! Throughout the land’s fair length and breadth Hath been of late a storm Of politicians great and small, In clamours for reform; But when, upon the twelfth of March, An anxious day for many, The Bill, so long looked forward to, Had scarce a charm for any. And while this great imperfect scheme GLADSTONE’S attention fills, ANDERSON would whisper in your ear, Reform your household bills. His is the Best TEA you can buy, And Cheapest too as well; And these are genuine reforms, As you who buy will tell. — A GREAT portion of the First and Finest Arrivals of each New Season’s Teas is consigned to W. ANDERSON; and in consequence of the enormous Sales which he can effect, he is enabled to dispose of them at Prices which defy competition. The following, among others, are to be had at the Pagoda Establishments, 116 TRONGATE, and 105 DALMARNOCK ROAD, GLASGOW:—
Green Gunpowder tea, finest, 3s 8d per lb. Good Strong Black Tea, 1s 6d “Very Fine Souchong Tea, Rich and Well Flavoured 1s 8d” Paisley Herald, 12 May 1866.
Clearly, reform had reached popular culture and become fully part of the popular imaginary.
Notes 1. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974). 2. Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 297
3. Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4. Gustav H. Klaus, The Literature of Labour: 200 Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1985). 5. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working- Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 6. Paul Murphy, Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals 1816–1858 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 7. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001); rprnt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 8. Mike Sanders, ‘“A Jackass Load of Poetry:” The Northern Star’s Poetry Column 1838–1852’, Victorian Periodicals Review 39: 1 (Spring, 2006), 46–66. 9. James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 (London: Croom Helm, 1982). 10. Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11. Peter Schekner, An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class 1830s–1850s (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1989). 12. Brian Maidment, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987). 13. John Goodridge (general editor), Nineteenth-century Labouring-class Poets, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto 2006). 14. For example, Jutta Schwartzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991); Susan Zlotnick, Women Writing and the Industrial Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998). 15. Neil Astley, ed., Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2017). The term dialect poetry is unfortunately necessary, connoting as it does an A/Not A binary between Standard English and other dialects rather than one dialect among many. 16. Chartist leaders and editors had different aims and approaches, for exam- ple, to the question of violent direct action, and involved in the wider movement were, for example, Owenite socialists, Benthamites, followers of Cobbett, Tory radicals, and Tory paternalists. For the confluence of influences on and parties within Chartism, see Sanders,The Poetry of Chartism, pp. 20–21. 17. The Northern Star and National Trades Journal (7 August 1852). 18. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (1932); rprnt (Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), 34–40 quoted in Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p. 14. 298 S. BYRNE
Sanders notes that Cauldwell anticipates Brian Maidmont’s observation that Chartist lyric ‘attempts to bring into being post-revolutionary con- sciousness’. Brian Maidmont, ed., The Poor House Fugitives (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982), p. 38, quoted in Sanders, ibid. 19. Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p. 12. 20. Sanders, op. cit., p. 13. 21. Ernest Jones, ‘The Poet’s Mission’, The Battle-Day and Other Poems (London: G. Routledge, 1855), p. 122. 22. Allen Davenport, ‘The Poet’s Hope’, Northern Star (11 April 1846), 8. 23. John Critchley Prince, ‘To Poesy’, Hours with the Muses (1841); 6th revd edn (London: Sampson Low; Manchester: A. and J. Heywood; Hyde: G. Booth, 1857), pp. 53–55. 24. Samuel Laycock, ‘What! Another Cracked Poet’, Warblins Fro’ An Owd Songster, 3rd edn (1894), pp. 107–109. 25. Laycock, op. cit., pp. 70–74; pp. 74–77. 26. Charles Cole, ‘Love of Liberty’, Political and Other Poems by Charles Cole, A London Mechanic (London: W.C. Mantz, 1833), p. 3. 27. Fanny Forrester, ‘The Lowly Bard’, Ben Brierley’s Journal (1873), 265 quoted in Florence S. Boos, ed., Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), p. 241. Boos’ note. 28. Maynard Keynes, interviewed by Kingsley Martin, New Statesman and Nation (28 January 1939), 122. 29. See, for example, non-fiction accounts such as Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) and Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor 4 vols 1851–1861, and fictional, including Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or, the Two Nations 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1845) and Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850). 30. Charles Dickens, speech (Birmingham, 1852) in K. J. Fielding, ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 155. 31. For example, Ernest Jones, Chartist Songs and Fugitive Pieces (1848), which cost 1d. Jones was a barrister and a co-editor of the Labourer with Feargus O’Connor. 32. Meagan Timney, ‘Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics’, Victorian Poetry 49: 1 (2011), 127–146 (129). 33. Florence S. Boos, ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’, Victorian Poetry 39:2 (Summer, 2001), 103–110 (105). 34. Ebenezer Elliott, preface to ‘The Village Patriarch’, The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Eliot, the Corn-law Rhymer (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1840), p. 55. 35. Frederick R. Robertson, ‘Two Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes’ in Lectures and Addresses on Literary and Social Topics 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 299
By the late Rev. Frederick W. Robertson (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), pp. 94–141 (96–97). 36. Robertson, op. cit., Lecture II, pp. 142–201) (145). 37. Robertson, op. cit., p. 165. 38. Robertson, op. cit., pp. 165–166. 39. Robertson, op. cit., pp. 196–197. 40. Robertson, op. cit., pp. 200–201. 41. Rose, op. cit., pp. 37–39. 42. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letter to Leigh Hunt, Letters II p. 191. Shelley’s emphasis. 43. Carey, op. cit., p. 5. 44. See, for example, David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 109–132. 45. Hannah More, Letter to Richard Beadon, Bishop of Bath and Wells, in The Letters of Hannah More, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1925), pp. 179–188 (183). 46. Elliott, ibid. 47. For example, Elliott’s ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’, op. cit., pp. 106–122. 48. For example, Mary Hutton, ‘On The Poor Laws’ Amendment Bill’, The Happy Isle and Other Poems (1836) in John Goodridge (general editor), Nineteenth-century Labouring-class Poets, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006); II ed. Kaye Kossick, 1830–1860, pp. 32–34. 49. See G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (1941); rprnt (London: Cassell, 1989), p. 65. 50. For example, Caroline Norton, A Voice from the Factories (London: John Murray, 1836). The Factory Act of 1819 stated that no child under the age of nine could be employed in the cotton mills and that employees between the ages of 9 and 16 should work a maximum of 12 hours a day. This was not enforced. The Factory Act of 1833, pertaining to all mills, specified that children between the ages of 9 and 13 should work for no more than 8 hours a day and that those between the ages of 13 and 18 should work no more than 12 hours a day. It also required that child workers under the age of 13 should have a minimum of 2 hours a day education. Inspectors were appointed but were largely ineffectual. There were further Factory Acts in 1844, 1847, 1850, and later. 51. Thomas Babington Macaulay, speech to the House of Commons, Hansard, Vol. 63, 3 May 1842. 52. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1840), pp. 2–3. 53. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p. 3. 54. See Sanders, ‘A Jackass Load’, pp. 53–54. 300 S. BYRNE
55. Ernest Jones, ‘Literary Review: Ebenezer Elliott’ The Labourer II (1847), 235–240 (237). Jones’ emphasis. 56. Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books (London: Jeremiah How, 1845). Subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition. 57. Rose, op. cit., pp. 123–124. 58. Sanders asserts that with determination and luck, an autodidact could complete a course of reading comparable to that of an undergraduate syl- labus. Poetry of Chartism, p. 8. 59. Vicinus, op. cit., p. 96. 60. W.H. Chaloner, transl, ‘Introduction’, Y.V. Kovalev, ed., The Literature of Chartism; rprnt, Victorian Studies 2:2 (1 December 1958), 117–138 (127). 61. Ernest Jones, ‘Onward’, The Labourer II (1847), 1. Jones’s emphasis. 62. Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 139. 63. See Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, pp. 111–114. 64. Channing (no first name), ‘Tendency of the Present Age’, The Chartist Circular (14 August 1841), 415. 65. Channing, ‘Wordsworth’, op. cit., p. 416. 66. Unsigned, ‘The Politics of Poets III’, The Chartist Circular (1 August 1840), 182. 67. Unsigned, ‘The Politics of Poets IV’, The Chartist Circular (29 August 1840), 198. 68. ‘Poetry for the People’, The Northern Star (23 September 1848), 3. The second article on de Beranger appeared on 30 September 1848. Original emphasis. 69. Elliott, op. cit., p. 55. 70. Unsigned, ‘Literary Review’, The Labourer (August 1847), 94–96 (95). 71. Ebenezer Jones, The Labourer (October 1847), 235–240 (236). 72. Rose, op. cit., p. 37. 73. Rose, op. cit., p. 39. Samuel Bamford, Early Days (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1849), pp. 192–195, 209–210, 280–282 (Rose’s note). 74. Thomas Cooper, ‘To the Young Men of the Working-Classes’ in Thomas Cooper, ed., Cooper’s Journal, or, Unfettered Thinker and Plain Speaker for Truth, Freedom, and Progress I: 9 (2 March 1850), 129–132. 75. Cooper, ‘To the Young men of the Working-Classes’, op. cit., I: 11209–11213. 76. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London: John Murray, 1859). 77. Unsigned, ‘A Biographical Sketch’ Eliza Cook’s Journal (12 April 1851), 372–375 (372), attributed to Samuel Smiles by the Gerald Massey web- 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 301
site: http://gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dpm_poems_and_ballads3_ biog.htm. 78. Sanders, op. cit., p. 47. 79. Northern Star (31 March 1838), 4. Sanders’ note, op. cit., p. 51. 80. Northern Star (22 December 1838), 4. Sanders’ note, ibid. 81. Sanders, op. cit., p. 53. 82. J. (Bristol), ‘The Commission of Genius’, The Northern Star (4 January 1845), 3 at Nineteenth-century Serials Edition: https://ncse.ac.uk/peri- odicals/ns/issues/ns2_04011845/page/3/articles/ar00300/. 83. Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 226–228. 84. ‘The Toiler’s Dream’, The Northern Star (8 February 1851), 7 at Nineteenth-century Serials Edition: https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/ issues/vm2-ncseproduct1612/page/3/. 85. Vincent suggests that silent reading was always accomplished alone, over- looking the necessary acquisition of the skill of shutting out other inhab- itants in a crowded home. See op. cit., p. 183. 86. Gerard Massey, ‘Our Land’, The Friend of the People (21 December 1850) in Peter Sheckner, ed., An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the Working Class 1830s–1850s (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), pp. 274–275. 87. See Janowitz’s use of this term, op. cit., p. 16. 88. Gerald Massey, ‘Our Symbol’ in Voices of Freedom and Love (London: J. Watson, 1851), pp. 9–10. 89. Sanders gives a number of examples, including Philip Bevan, ‘The Covenanters’, The Northern Star (22 February 1840), 7 and McDouall’s ‘Now Wide and Far the Tyrant’s Power Prevails’ Northern Star (22 February 1840), 7. Sanders, Chartist Poetry, pp. 108–109. 90. The Northern Star 9 May to 15 August 1840. Discussed in Sanders, Chartist Poetry, pp. 114–119. 91. This differs from the English Chartist Circular, which was established in 1841. 92. David Wright, ‘The Working Bee’, The Chartist Circular (17 July 1841), 400. 93. ‘An Industrious Englishman’, ‘Ode to Labour’, The Chartist Circular (12 October 1839)12. Reprinted from Tait’s Magazine. 94. ‘Peter Pindar Esq’, ‘Ode to Tyrants’, The Chartist Circular (9 November 1839), 28. 95. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Industrial Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 177. 96. See, for example, Richard Oastler, Rights of the Poor to Liberty and Life (London: Roake and Varty, 1838). 302 S. BYRNE
97. David Ashforth, ‘The Urban Poor Law’ in Derek Fraser, ed., The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 128–148 (130). 98. Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System 1834–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 118. 99. Report from his Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (London: B. Fellowes, 1834), p. 262. 100. Poor Laws, p. 263. 101. Poor Laws, p. 264. 102. David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth-century Britain 1834–1914: From Chadwick to Booth (Harlow: Longman, 1998), p. 49. 103. Mary Hutton, ‘On The Poor Laws’ Amendment Bill’, The Happy Isle and Other Poems (1836) in John Goodridge (general editor), Nineteenth- century Labouring-class Poets 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006); ed. Kaye Kossick, I 1830–1860, pp. 32–34. 104. ‘Marcus’, An Essay on Populousness Printed for Private Circulation (London: 1838). 105. ‘Marcus’, op. cit., II, pp. 7–8. 106. ‘Marcus’, op. cit., p. 17. 107. ‘Marcus’, op. cit., p. 14. 108. See, for example, Stephen Watson Fullom, Poor-Law Rhymes or Anti- Marcus (London: B.D. Cousins, 1839). 109. W.J. Linton, The Life and Adventures of Bob Thin, or The Poorhouse Fugitive: A Political-Philosophical-Historical-Biographical-Anecdotical- Allegorical-Pathetical-Prophetical-Poetical-Logical-Metrical and Moral New Poor-Law Tale, illus. T. Sibson, W.B. Scott, E. Duncan and W.J. Linton (No publisher or printer, 1845). 110. For a discussion of this poem and its unusual woodblock decorative capi- tals, see Margaret A. Loose, The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014), pp. 34–63. 111. William Barnes, The Rights of the Necessitous considered in connection with reason, law, and scripture: in reply to the assault made on property by poverty in the New Poor Law (Whittaker: London, 1841). Subsequent parentheti- cal references will be to this edition. Original emphasis. 112. E.J.B., ‘Nature’s First, Last and Only Will, or A Hint to Mr Bull’, The Medusa, or Penny Politician I: 8 (10 April 1819), 60. Spence’s plan is detailed in the 12 June 1819 edition of the journal, pp. 129–131. 113. Illustration (fig 1) in Eileen Groth Lyon, Politicians in the Pulpit: Christian Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 303
Disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 9. For the use of scripture by Christian radicals, see Groth Lyon pp. 134–141. 114. Samuel Bamford, ‘God Help the Poor’, Poems (Manchester: Printed for the Author, 1843), pp. 101–103 (103). 115. Cooper had been a Wesleyan minister and was subsequently a preacher in the Baptist faith. 116. For discussion of Chartist theology, see Mike Sanders, ‘“God is our guide! Our cause is just!” The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies 54: 4 (2012), 679–705. 117. On the poem’s attack on religious anti-intellectualism, see Loose, op. cit., pp. 54–55. 118. Loose, op. cit., p. 43. 119. John Critchley Prince, ‘The Death of the Factory Child’, The People’s Friend (July 1841), 206–207. 120. Richard Oastler, The Fleet Papers, Being Letters to Thomas Thornhill, Esq. of Riddlesworth in the County of Norfolk, from Richard Oastler, his prisoner with occasional communication from friends I: 15 (10 April 1841), p. 120. 121. John Nicholson, The Factory-Child, A Poem (London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnold, 1831); The Factory-Child’s Mother: The Voice of true Humanity: A Poem (Leeds: Printed by Edward Baines, 1832); James Ross, ‘The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply to the Factory Child’s Mother: A Poem’, ‘The Factory Child’s Hymn’, and ‘Song of the Factory Children’ in The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply to the Factory Child’s Mother: A Poem by James Ross, an Operative, to Which are Subjoined Poems by Two Ladies (Leeds: Printed by Hernaman and Herring, 1832), pp. 9–38; pp. 36–38; pp. 39–42. 122. G.S. Bull, The Cause of Industry: A Letter to the Hon. John Stuart Wortley, Candidate for the West-Riding (Bradford, 1835), p. 3, quoted in Groth Lyon, op. cit., p. 127. Groth Lyon’s note. 123. Anon, Review, ‘Attempts at Verse, by John Jones, an old servant: with some account of the Writer by himself; and an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of Uneducated Poets, by Robert Southey’, Edinburgh Review 54 (1831), 69–84 (70). 124. Review, Edinburgh Review, op. cit., 81. 125. Review, Edinburgh Review, op. cit., 84. 126. Maidment, op. cit., p. 297. 127. Thomas Carlyle, Review of Ebenezer Elliott, Corn-Law Rhymes, Edinburgh Review 110 (July 1832), 338–361 (339). Quoted in Maidment, ibid. 128. Marcus Waithe, ‘The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliott and the “active” poet’ in Loose, op. cit., pp. 130–131 (130). 304 S. BYRNE
129. George Gilfillan, ‘Ebenezer Elliott’ inA Gallery of Literary Portraits (Edinburgh 1845) rprnt (Edinburgh: J. Hogg, 1852), pp. 242–252 (249). Quoted in Maidment, op. cit., p. 300. 130. Maidment, ibid. 131. Maidment, op. cit., p. 17. 132. Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt’ in Poems by Thomas Hood (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), pp. 45–48. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition. 133. Alvin Whitley, ‘Thomas Hood and the Times’, Times Literary Supplement 2881 (17 May 1957), 309. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8cdsT3. 134. Henry Moses, Letter to the Times 18441 (31 October 1843), 3. 135. ‘The Condition of England Question’, the Northern Star (25 November 1843), 7. https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/issues/vm2-ncseprod- uct1240/page/7/articles/ar00711/. 136. Hood, ‘The Lay of the Labourer’, op. cit, pp. 56–59. 137. Thomas Hood, ‘The Pauper’s Christmas’, The Serious Poems of Thomas Hood (London: Edward Moxon, 1868), pp. 426–427. 138. The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens, ed., F.G. Kitton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), pp. 101–103. Subsequent parenthetical refer- ences are to this edition. 139. See Mike Sanders, ‘God is Our Guide’. 140. Charles Dickens, ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’, The Examiner (7 August 1841), 500. 141. Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster (undated) quoted in The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens ed. F.G. Kitton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), p. 57. 142. Elizabeth Barrett, ‘The Cry of the Children’ in Poems (1844), rprnt in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Complete Works eds Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1900) III, p. 153. 143. E.S. Groves, The New Poor Law, as Administered by Guardians, or Reality and Fiction, Identified by a Surgeon (London: J. Darkin, 1845). 144. Representation of the People Act 1867, 30 and 31 Vict. c.102. 145. Coventry Patmore, “1867’ The Unknown Eros (1878), 4th edn (London: George Bell, 1897); pp. 29–31. Subsequent line references will be to this edition. 146. Thomas Carlyle, Shooting Niagara: And After?’ (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867); revd rprnt from Macmillan’s Magazine (1867), p. 1. 147. Erin Farley note to no. 25, ‘Reform!’ in The People’s Voice: Scottish Political Poetry, Song and the Franchise 1832–1918, Part Two: Poems relating to the Representation of the People Acts, 1867–8, eds Kirstie Blair, Gerard Carruthers, Erin Farley, Catriona M.M. MacDonald, Honour Rieley and 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 305
Michael Shaw, p. 59. https://thepeoplesvoice.glasgow.ac.uk/wp-con- tent/uploads/2018/02/Anthology-1867.pdf. Funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, this project, conducted between 2016 and 2018, unearthed a wealth of politi- cal poetry in the Scottish popular press, in broadsides, and in antholo- gised collections. Outputs on this website use these findings to analyse the role that poetry and song played in the extension of the electoral franchise in 1832, 1867–1868, 1884, and 1918. https://thepeoples- voice.glasgow.ac.uk.
Bibliography ‘Anon, The Condition of England Question’, The Northern Star (25 November 1843), 7. https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1240/ page/7/articles/ar00711/. ‘Marcus’, An Essay on Populousness, Printed for Private Circulation. London: 1838. An Industrious Englishman, ‘Ode to Labour’, The Chartist Circular (12 October 1839)12. Reprinted from Tait’s Magazine. Anon, Review, ‘Attempts at Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant: With Some Account of the Writer by Himself; and an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of Uneducated Poets, by Robert Southey’, Edinburgh Review 54 (1831), 69–84 (70). Anon, ‘The Toiler’s Dream’, The Northern Star (8 February 1851), 7 at Nineteenth-century Serials Edition. https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/ issues/vm2-ncseproduct1612/page/3/. Ashforth, David, ‘The Urban Poor Law’, in The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Derek Fraser, 128–148 (130). London: Macmillan, 1976. Astley, Neil, ed., Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2017. Bamford, Samuel, ‘God Help the Poor’, Poems, 101–103. Manchester: Printed for the Author, 1843. Barnes, William, The Rights of the Necessitous Considered in Connection with Reason, Law, and Scripture: In Reply to the Assault made on Property by Poverty in the New Poor Law. Whittaker: London, 1841. Barrett, Elizabeth, Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1844. Blair, Kirstie, and Mina Gorji, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Boos, Florence S., ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’, Victorian Poetry 39, no. 2 (Summer, 2001), 103–110. ———, ed., Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2008. Carlyle, Thomas, Chartism. London: James Fraser, 1840. 306 S. BYRNE
———, Shooting Niagara: And After?’ London: Chapman and Hall, 1867; Rev. reprint from Macmillan’s Magazine (1867). Chaloner, W.H., trans., ‘Introduction’, in The Literature of Chartism, ed. Y.V. Kovalev; reprint, Victorian Studies 2, no. 2 (1 December 1958), 117–138. Channing, ‘Tendency of the Present Age’, The Chartist Circular (14 August 1841a), 415. ———, ‘Wordsworth’, The Chartist Circular (14 August 1841b), 416. Cole, Charles, Political and Other Poems by Charles Cole, A London Mechanic. London: W.C. Mantz, 1833. Cole, G.D.H., Chartist Portraits (1941); reprint, London: Cassell, 1989. Cooper, Thomas, The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books. London: Jeremiah How, 1845. ———, ‘To the Young Men of the Working-Classes’, in Cooper’s Journal, or, Unfettered Thinker and Plain Speaker for Truth, Freedom, and Progress, ed. Thomas Cooper, Vol. I: 9, 129–132. London: J. Watson, 1850. Critchley Prince, John, ‘The Death of the Factory Child’, The People’s Friend (July 1841), 206–207. ———, ‘To Poesy’, in Hours with the Muses (1841), 6th rev. edn. London: Sampson Low; Manchester: A. and J. Heywood; Hyde: G. Booth, (1857), pp. 53–55. Davenport, Allen, ‘The Poet’s Hope’, Northern Star (11 April 1846), 8. Dickens, Charles, ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’, The Examiner (7 August 1841), 500. ———, The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens, ed. F.G. Kitton. London: Chapman and Hall, 1903. ———, ‘Speech (Birmingham, 1852)’, in The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding, 155. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil, or, the Two Nations, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1845. Driver, Felix, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System 1834–1884. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. E.J.B., ‘Nature’s First, Last and Only Will, or A Hint to Mr Bull’, The Medusa, or Penny Politician I, no. 8 (10 April 1819), 60. Elliott, Ebenezer, The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Eliot, the Corn-law Rhymer. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1840. Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844); reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009. Englander, David, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth-century Britain 1834–1914: From Chadwick to Booth. Harlow: Longman, 1998. Epstein, James, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Farley, Erin, ‘Note to no. 25, “Reform!”’, in The People’s Voice: Scottish Political Poetry, Song and the Franchise 1832–1918, Part Two: Poems relating to the 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 307
Representation of the People Acts, 1867–8, eds Kirstie Blair, Gerard Carruthers, Erin Farley, Catriona M.M. MacDonald, Honour Rieley, and Michael Shaw, 59. https://thepeoplesvoice.glasgow.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ Anthology-1867.pdf. Goodridge, John, ed., Nineteenth-century Labouring-class Poets, 3 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. Groth Lyon, Eileen, Politicians in the Pulpit: Christian Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the Disintegration of Chartism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Groves, E.S., The New Poor Law, as Administered by Guardians, or Reality and Fiction, Identified by a Surgeon. London: J. Darkin, 1845. Haywood, Ian, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Industrial Age. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Hood, Thomas, Poems by Thomas Hood. London: Edward Moxon, 1846. ———, The Serious Poems of Thomas Hood. London: Edward Moxon, 1868. Hutton, Mary, ‘“On The Poor Laws” Amendment Bill’, in The Happy Isle and Other Poems (1836), Nineteenth-century Labouring-class Poets, ed. John Goodridge, 3 vols, Vol. I (1830–1860), ed. Kaye Kossick, 32–34. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. J. (Bristol), ‘The Commission of Genius’, The Northern Star (4 January 1845), 3 at Nineteenth-century Serials Edition. https://ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ns/ issues/ns2_04011845/page/3/articles/ar00300/. Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jones, Ebenezer, ‘Literary Review’, The Labourer (October 1847a), 235–240 (236). ———, ‘Literary Review: Ebenezer Elliott’, The Labourer II (1847b), 235–240. ———, ‘Onward’, The Labourer II (1847c), 1. ———, The Battle-Day and Other Poems. London: G. Routledge, 1855. Keynes, Maynard, ‘Interviewed by Kingsley Martin’, New Statesman and Nation (28 January 1939), 122. Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1850. Klaus, Gustav H., The Literature of Labour: 200 Years of Working-Class Writing. Brighton: Harvester, 1985. Laycock, Samuel, ‘What! Another Cracked Poet’, Warblins Fro’ An Owd Songster, 3rd edn. Oldham: Clegg, 1894, pp. 107–109. Linton, W.J., The Life and Adventures of Bob Thin, or The Poorhouse Fugitive: A Political-Philosophical-Historical-Biographical-Anecdotical-Allegorical- Pathetical-Prophetical-Poetical-Logical-Metrical and Moral New Poor-Law Tale, illus. T. Sibson, W.B. Scott, E. Duncan, and W.J. Linton (No publisher or printer, 1845). 308 S. BYRNE
Loose, Margaret A., The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014. Macaulay, Thomas Babington, ‘Speech to the House of Commons’, Hansard, Vol. 63, 3 May 1842. Maidment, Brian, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987. Massey, Gerald, ‘“Our Land”, The Friend of the People (21 December 1850)’, in An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the Working Class 1830s–1850s, ed. Peter Sheckner, 274–275. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989. ———, ‘Our Symbol’, in Voices of Freedom and Love, 9–10. London: J. Watson, 1851. Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co., 1851–1861. More, Hannah, The Letters of Hannah More, ed. R. Brimley Johnson. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1925. Moses, Henry, Letter to the Times 18441 (31 October 1843), 3. Murphy, Paul, Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals 1816–1858. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Nicholson, John, The Factory-Child, A Poem. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnold, 1831. ———, The Factory-Child’s Mother: The Voice of true Humanity: A Poem. Leeds: Printed by Edward Baines, 1832. Norton, Caroline, A Voice from the Factories. London: John Murray, 1836. Oastler, Richard, Rights of the Poor to Liberty and Life. London: Roake and Varty, 1838. ———, The Fleet Papers, Being Letters to Thomas Thornhill, Esq. of Riddlesworth in the County of Norfolk, from Richard Oastler, His Prisoner with Occasional Communication from Friends I, no. 15 (10 April 1841), p. 120. Patmore, Coventry, ‘1867’, in The Unknown Eros (1878), 4th edn. London: George Bell, 1897, pp. 29–31. Peter Pindar Esq, ‘Ode to Tyrants’, The Chartist Circular (9 November 1839), 28. Report from his Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws. London: B. Fellowes, 1834. Representation of the People Act 1867, 30 and 31 Vict. c.102. Robertson, Frederick R., ‘Two Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes’, in Lectures and Addresses on Literary and Social Topics by the Late Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. London: Smith, Elder, 1858. Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), rprnt New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. 6 THE MID- TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 309
Ross, James, The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply to the Factory Child’s Mother: A Poem by James Ross, an Operative, to Which Are Subjoined Poems by Two Ladies. Leeds: Printed by Hernaman and Herring, 1832. Sanders, Mike, ‘“A Jackass Load of Poetry:” The Northern Star’s Poetry Column 1838–1852’, Victorian Periodicals Review 39, no. 1 (Spring, 2006), 46–66. ———, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———, ‘“God is our guide! Our cause is just!” The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies 54, no. 4 (2012), 679–705. Schekner, Peter, An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class 1830s–1850s. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1989). Schwartzkopf, Jutta, Women in the Chartist Movement. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991. Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct. London: John Murray, 1859. Stedman Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. The Northern Star and National Trades Journal (7 August 1852). Timney, Meagan, ‘Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics’, Victorian Poetry 49, no. 1 (2011), 127–146. Unsigned, ‘The Politics of Poets III’, The Chartist Circular (1 August 1840a), 182. ———, ‘The Politics of Poets IV’, The Chartist Circular (29 August 1840b), 198. ———, ‘Literary Review’, The Labourer (August 1847), 94–96. ———, ‘Poetry for the People’, The Northern Star (23 September 1848), 3. ———, ‘A Biographical Sketch’, Eliza Cook’s Journal (12 April 1851), 372–375 (372), Attributed to Samuel Smiles by the Gerald Massey Website. http:// gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dpm_poems_and_ballads3_biog.htm. Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature. London: Croom Helm, 1974. Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1981. Watson Fullom, Stephen, Poor-Law Rhymes or Anti-Marcus. London: B.D. Cousins, 1839). Whitley, Alvin, ‘Thomas Hood and the Times’, Times Literary Supplement 2881 (17 May 1957), 309. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8cdsT3. Wright, David, ‘The Working Bee’, The Chartist Circular (17 July 1841), 400. Zlotnick, Susan, Women Writing and the Industrial Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998. CHAPTER 7
The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s
This section of the study is concerned with some of the schools and move- ments by which poetry in the twentieth century has been classified. It looks at the persistence of representations of social division and inequality during a period of better education, greater literacy, and shorter working hours for most working-class people, and of the further alienation of the worker by the drive towards greater efficiency in production processes through fragmentation, streamlining, and automation.1 It begins with a discussion of the discourse of chivalry and the Classical in poetry of the Great War. The alleged exclusivity of Modernist poetry is contrasted with the reaction against that exclusivity and with a series of negative represen- tations of the middle classes. The section draws on the work of several critics and historians. Elizabeth Vandiver provides an invaluable survey of Classical references in Great War poetry.2 Allen J. Frantzen traces the importance of chivalry in the cultural imaginary of that war3; Leonard Diepeveen4 explores the dilemmas of Modernism; Lawrence Rainey analy- ses Modernism’s relation to economics and consumerism5; John Carey considers the movement of Modernism in terms of exclusivity; a number of authors, including Michael H. Whitworth,6 provide excellent overviews of the heterogeneities of Modernism.7 The work of W.H. Auden is exam- ined as both a reaction against Modernism and a continuation of Modernist preoccupations. Movement poetry is considered in the context of the Welfare State and state interventions in the arts. This discussion draws on the work of Blake Morrison, which considers the importance of the
© The Author(s) 2020 311 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_7 312 S. BYRNE
Movement,8 of Peter Womack, which provides a trenchant argument about class bias,9 and of Alan Sinfield and Raymond Williams, which pro- vide exemplary models of historical materialist approaches to literature.10 If during this period ‘the conception of man’ became primarily that of ‘a worker’11 so that identity was to a large extent produced by occupation, it was also, together with the rest of the twentieth century, a period of widespread long-term unemployment. It was the period of the expansion of the non-manual labourer of the lower middle class, and of the consoli- dation of power of the trades unions, but also of mockery of that expan- sion and resistance to that power. White-collar workers in clerical, sales, or service occupations were literate, freed from the manual toil of agriculture and heavy industry, but not necessarily from repetitive, monotonous, or deadening work. They attained some level of disposable income and some waking leisure time. Although scholarships to fee-paying schools were few, institutions such as the WEA, the Oxford Extension Lectures, Ruskin College, and the National Council of Labour Colleges offered educa- tional opportunities to working-class people. The Newbolt Report (1921) emphasised the importance of the study of the English language and lit- erature as well as composition in state schools.12 The encouragement of attentive close reading could foster creative writing, and the emphasis on skills of rhetoric and oratory could have been empowering for working- class pupils, but it was also disempowering, because of the emphasis on the imposition of Standard English, even though the provisions included ‘That the schools should not aim at the suppression of dialect, but at mak- ing the children bi-lingual’. Workers might cease to be renters of homes owned by the better-off and become homeowners and therefore might be more settled than itinerant or seasonally employed workers dependent on landlords or more able to move homes and jobs with impunity; they might migrate from the lower-middle to the middle classes. There is as a great a divide and as much snobbery involved in the distinction made between the profit-making class (shop worker, banker, stockbroker) and the sala- ried professional classes (doctors, lawyers, scholars, clergy) as there is between the working classes and those supported by a private income. The word bourgeois becomes an insult and writers of all classes profess radicalism and are accused of bad faith. The middle class, represented as producing nothing, lacking autonomy, alienated, fed on debased mass culture, becomes a subject of Modernist poetry, as it does of Modernist prose fiction. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 313
Poetry of the Great War Writing about the extent of literacy and interest in reading in Britain in 1914 and after, Paul Fussell gives the example of Private John Beal, who carries in his haversack a copy of Arthur Quiller Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse. Fussell says that ‘Ball and his friends have no feeling that literature is not very near the center of normal experience, no sense that it belongs to intellectuals or aesthetes or teachers or critics’.13 Perhaps, but there was a sense that Classical literature belonged to the public schools and universities. In adding that Wilfred Owen’s famous poem uses as its title and quotes ‘a Latin tag from Horace familiar to every British school- boy’, Fussell is overestimating the extent to which Classics featured in state school curricula. Whilst some grammar and other state schools gen- erated an interest in and familiarity with Latin verse, this was by no means universal. Archaisms and Miltonic inversions abound in poems in the Wipers Times, and there are some literary allusions, but not many. Gilbert Frankau refers to Omar Khayyam’s Saki in ‘Urgent or Ordinary’, and Anon apologises to Gray for ‘A Dweller in Wipers’ Elegy to That Town’.14 The allusions are mostly to satirical parallels between the trenches and London, domestic life, and the pastoral.15 Classical allusions abound in poems by soldier-poets educated in public schools. Two years before the start of what would become known as the Great War, Herbert Asquith (1881–1947), a younger son of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, first Earl of Oxford, imagined a death in war time. By the time ‘The Volunteer’ was published in Asquith’s 1915 collection, it would have seemed very much like a poem of the Great War. The poem acknowledges that idealism and patriotism are not the prerogative of the upper classes by referring to a volunteer soldier of the lower middle class, a clerk.16 That the man is signified by that class-marked job, ‘Here lies a clerk’, when he died a soldier, in a phrase that echoes a headstone’s carv- ing but erases the name and rank, is in itself telling. There is also some- thing condescending about the description of the man, his life, and his dreams. He had spent half of his life
Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, Thinking that his days would so drift away With no lance broken in life’s tournament. (ll. 1–4). His solace is day-dreaming, in his imagination 314 S. BYRNE
The gleaming eagles of the legions came. And horsemen, charging under phantom skies, Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme. (ll. 5–8)
The dead patriot is envisaged as dreaming of a world more desirable than his own, strangely, one of the Roman army that conquered Britain, and the banner of the French king which, once aloft, signified that no prison- ers would be taken until it was lowered. Those two images are probably not meant to be read so literally, as indicated by the ‘phantom’ skies and their very simultaneity in the poem. They are part of the discourse of glorious war, an atemporal, aspatial mix of history, myth, and art. In death, the man has attained a better way of being than his dreary ‘twi- light’ working life and joins other men who fought and died for their country. Indeed, until the hour in which he died, he didn’t live. His dreams are satisfied:
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went; His lance is broken; but he lies content
While he fought, he truly lived, in ‘a high hour’, and wants nothing more:
‘Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.’ (ll. 9–16)
The register of chivalry—‘halls’, ‘lance’, ‘high hour’, ‘Agincourt’—hints that in this glorious voluntary sacrifice class differences are irrelevant, as though the death conferred armigerous status, making up for the clerk’s not having been brought up in what Vandiver refers to as the public school ‘religion’ of manliness, endurance, and sacrifice.17 Yet though he ‘lies con- tent’ (and the other meaning of lies is as present here as in Larkin’s ‘Church Going’), it is the ‘waiting dreams’, not he, that are satisfied. Waiting, not waking dreams, suggests that death in war was an inevitable fate, not a willed outcome, and makes ‘found his battle’ hollow, since this was no chosen one-to-one joust in a tournament of chivalry. ‘Thinking that his days would so drift away/ With no lance broken’ presumably means that the clerk regretting not breaking another’s lance, but it could also hint at desired sacrifice; he regrets not having the prospect of having his lance broken. The discourse of chivalry was ubiquitous in war propaganda, in post- ers, poems, slogans, and speeches, and chivalry, as Frantzen argues, pro- motes an ethos of sacrifice and anti-sacrifice.18 A speech given by 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 315
Herbert Asquith’s father to the house in 1916 refers to ‘this long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by death- less examples of heroism and chivalry [… and] the flower of our youth, the hope and promise of our future [whose] sacrifice shall not have been in vain’.19 The 16 regular mostly iambic pentameter lines (apart from a few tro- chaic feet at the beginning of lines) and the abba rhyme of some quatrains (others rhyme abab) suggest a Meredithian sonnet, but the line break between two octaves, dividing past drabness in life and present improve- ment in death, makes a distinct break. Three poems in the collection, dated 1915, use the rhetoric of glory, honour, and nobility and present not this war but War, abstracted from its materiality, in juxtapositions of ancient Greek and Norse myth, the Henry V of Shakespeare, and an imagined animated marble statue with bullets and shells. In ‘The Western Line’, the poem’s keenness on ‘The soldiers to Valhalla go!’, a repeated refrain, seems to present that imagi- nary as more real than Flanders in 1915.20 These of course come from the well-stocked myth-kitty of the public school-educated man at the time, an amalgam of Victorian medievalism, Edwardian adventure and historical romance stories, and study of Classics. The appeal of Homeric epic as a way of making a kind of sense of modern war is understandable; Homer’s gods were capricious, warlike, and vengeful; his heroes had no qualms about fighting. That the Greek and Norse gods were more likely to receive than to give sacrifice (leaving aside Odin’s hanging) might sit uneasily with the Christianised Classicism of other references, but Asquith, like other upper-class soldier-poets, combines the motifs of war as exciting vivid exploit (the game/blood-sport) and war as spiritual apotheosis (willing sacrifice). Asquith doesn’t use untranslated Latin tags or the mottoes of regiments and venerable houses, but this is a patrician discourse. Class divisions are evident in descriptions of ‘them’, the fight- ing men who live for rum and girls (ll. 47–48) until battle calls, versus that of the ‘I’ who hears ‘the tearing of a shell’. The inclusive plural pronoun appears in a poem about the death of a fellow (junior) officer: ‘The Fallen Subaltern’ in which ‘We bear our fallen friend without a sound’.21 This contradictory trope of the brotherhood of war dead joining the ranks of chivalry in a reversal of Homeric katabasis occurs in poems for high as well as low rank, for example, Edmund John’s ‘In Memoriam’ for 316 S. BYRNE
Lord Roberts of Kandahar, who is hailed by ‘kings and knights of old chivalry’,22 and Frank Taylor’s ‘The English Dead’ (written before the Great War), whose vision is of the dead, led by St George, ‘[w]ith lambent lance and white, bright, blinding sword/ All riding upon horses’, and which references Crécy, Agincourt, the Armada, Sidney, Wolfe, Pitt, Nelson, and others.23 The equal brotherhood of war extends to the dead of the past who return to fight for England (more often than Britain, or the allied nations) in many poems, notably Isaac Gregory Smith’s ‘Close Your Ranks’, in which the ‘silken threads […] bind in one/ The prince, the peasant, rich and poor’,24 and Margaret L. Woods, ‘The First Battle of Ypres’, which attributes the retreat of German forces after breaking through the allied lines to the presence of the ‘reserves’, the massed armies of ‘[o]ld heroic fighting men/ Who fought for chivalry’ as well as the more recent dead.25 The lifting or unsheathing of the sword is the symbol of entering armed conflict even after the introduction of mustard gas, machine guns, biplanes, and tanks, as though a more fitting, more noble weapon, and more in keeping with the chivalric dead brothers. In a speech following the invasion of Belgium, in November 1914, Herbert Asquith’s father announces that [w]e shall not sheathe the sword’ until Belgium recovers all that she has sacrificed. Like the lance, the sword has a met- onymic cluster of signifieds, but also, if Freudian theory is applied, a meta- phoric one, which strengthens the element of masculinity already present in the discourse of chivalry. Siegfried Sassoon’s (1886–1967) poem ‘The Soldier as Hero’ rejects this ethos of the chivalrous war of gentleman-knights. Whereas once the speaker ‘sought the Grail’, he has ‘said goodbye to Galahad’ and is no longer the ‘knight of dreams and show’. Yet there is still the sense of higher purpose and spirituality in war and of the eternal brotherhood of comrades. Now that he is fighting for ‘lusts’ and ‘senseless hatred’, he brings ‘absolution’ and the dead fight with him ‘wherever I go’.26 Whereas Asquith’s clerk’s reading of history or historical adventure novels and poems feeds his dream of Roman legions together with medi- eval knights, nothing in the poem suggests that he can read the language of Rome. Elizabeth Vandiver notes that Sassoon ‘had to correct’ a word in the Latin title of a poem by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’.27 She observes that
the whole story of [Owen’s] various plans and attempts for university study highlights just how pivotal Latin was in those plans, and what anxiety Latin 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 317
caused him as he attempted both to gain an education for its own sake and to move up the social ladder. In fact, he did not ever achieve full competency in the language.28
It therefore ‘seems very likely that since [Owen] never achieved reading competency in the ancient languages, he read translations as part of a deliberate programme of self-education in the craft of poetry’.29 It is pos- sible that Vandiver underestimates the linguistic competence of non- public-school boys as much as Fussell overestimates it, but though Owen’s parents paid for him to have Latin lessons until he was 14, and he contin- ued to work on the language himself, the assumption that Sassoon’s pub- lic-school education, providing an earlier start and more focused education in Classics, bestowed superior skills could be correct. For the public-school Classicists, Latin is their element; they swim in it; they own it; for the lower-class aspirant to social and educational ascent, use of Latin was a shibboleth, imperfectly acquired. Greek perhaps is associated with school and university. Though its use marks class as Latin does, it is less presented as a native tongue of the diglossic author than in quotation. The plethora of mythemes in the characters, episodes, and phrases of Homeric Greek, however, provide a shorthand register of heroism. Charles Hamilton Sorley’s (1895–1915) poem numbered ‘XXIX’ in Marlborough and Other Poems [‘I have not brought my Odyssey’]30 merges imagined ancient Greece and Sorley’s present as it depicts the younger generation of Hellene warriors visiting the older, hearing them telling stories of the Trojan War in the Mess as the port goes round (ll. 25–28). The gossip is denoted in the Greek letters κ.τ.λ, an abbreviation of και τα λοιπά (etc.).
that young chit Paris—who didn’t care a bit For Helen—only to annoy her He did it, really κ.τ.λ. (ll. 31–34)31
The poet at the feast is emphatically Greek, an ἀοιδός, in fact Homer him- self, white-haired and blind (ll. 36–39). Just as Telemachos and Peisistratos are inheritors of great traditions, from their respective fathers, Odysseus and Nestor, and will learn from the heroes they meet, so the young men from Marlborough School learn from their teachers and Homer. In a sense, the Trojan and Great Wars become part of the ahistorical and abstract War. In another, they are the province of the Classicists. The word 318 S. BYRNE
‘school’ suggests both the youth of the new generation of soldiers and their common purpose, but also their common culture, whose inculcation takes place in great part at school.
And now the fight begins again, The old war-joy, the old war-pain. Sons of one school across the sea. (ll. 55–57)
Owen’s bitterly ironic use of ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ encap- sulates the ‘old lie’ of the rhetorical mystification of war and the old lan- guage (patrician; high diction; Latin) taught in public schools and universities and passed on to cannon- and gas-fodder. Fewer canonical anthologised poets of the Great War use untranslated Latin tags in the body of their poems (as opposed to the titles32 and in letters and introduc- tions) than might be expected, however, though many, including Owen,33 employ allusions to and translations of ancient and Classical Latin and Greek works and to a ‘highly mythologized version of Classical Greek warfare’.34 As Alvarez notes (though negatively), this may act as a protec- tive filter to enable them to survive the horrors of the war.35 Vandiver lists a number of poems published in trench journals and regimental publica- tions such as Wipers Times which she suggests may be by middle- or work- ing-class poets, though in many cases this cannot be established. These, she argues, ‘were intended to be read by all ranks, including men who had not had public or grammar-school educations; thus, the presence of clas- sical tropes, characters, tags, and episodes in these journals seems to indi- cate that the authors assumed a certain level of classical knowledge among ‘other ranks’ as well as officers’.36 It cannot be proved that these publica- tions ‘therefore provide a useful guide to the sorts of classical references that lower-class readers would presumably find comprehensible’.37 Vandiver records some Latin quotations containing errors and states that some of the poems indicate ‘not a detailed knowledge of Roman culture and history, but of Latin pedagogy in British schools’.38 A story
depends for its success on two assumptions: that the reader will know enough about Latin grammar and the process of learning Latin to under- stand the references, but that the same reader will have been frustrated and annoyed enough by the seeming incomprehensibilities of Latin (how the dickens does one remember when to use the ablative?)39 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 319
Not all public-school Classicists fought in the Great War; not all espoused the ethos of pro patria; presumably not all regarded a grammar or indeed other state school education as inferior to their own. A larger and more overt rebellion in poetry against that ethos and against the class with which it is associated, however, is not enacted until a later generation matures. In 1932, Eliot still advocated a Classical education, on the basis that without a foundation of Latin and Greek our powers over other sub- jects are limited.40 The extent to which this should be available to all is, however, disputed. In a section of an essay on the definition of culture published in the New Review in 1945, Eliot considers some contemporary claims made for the function of education in eradicating social inequality.41 He distinguishes between an élite and a class, noting that artists and lead- ers may come from any class, and in advocating a society in which mem- bers’ functions are delegated on the basis of ability may seem to be advocating the abolition of class. He refers, however, to
the opinion of some of the most advanced minds’ that qualitative distinc- tions between individuals must still be recognised and that the superior indi- viduals must be formed into superior groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps rewarded with varied emoluments and honours.42
Whilst acknowledging that many members of the upper middle and upper classes have been ‘conspicuously deficient in “culture”’, Eliot states that in the past ‘the repository of “culture” has been the élite mostly drawn from the dominant class of the time, constituting the primary consumers of the work of thought and art produced by the minority members, who will have originated from various classes, including that class itself’.43 This elite must not be cut off from membership of their class or they would lose their function, to transmit their inherited culture. ‘It is the function of the class as a whole to preserve and communicate standards of manners, which is itself a vital element in the higher level of culture. It is the function of the superior members and superior families to preserve this culture, as it is the function of the producers to alter it’. For Eliot, contemporary ideas about democratisation of society through education are flawed because they are without class distinctions: ‘not everything worth preserving can be transmitted by teaching’, and children educated out of their birth class into an élite will have ‘no social cohesion, no social continuity’.44 Therefore, he questions ‘two popular ideas: that of equality and that of equal oppor- 320 S. BYRNE tunity’, suggesting that it is possible that neither is tenable and that they may be incompatible. Views such as Eliot’s were not unchallenged; some poets who had been educated in the Classics, some of whom had taught Classics, and who retained the Classical idea of the superiority of poetry to prose fiction,45 nonetheless deprecated a Classical education as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, for example, C. Day Lewis, in ‘An Expensive Education’, pub- lished in Left Review (February 1937). Allusion, to Classical or other litera- ture, which was to be deprecated by Philip Larkin in the 1950s, remained a significant method of the poetry associated with the aftermath of the Great War. Episodes from ancient and Classical history continue to appear in ahis- torical tropes denoting all wars, for example, in poems such as The Gaze of the Gorgon in 1992.46 Classics remain a metonymy for culture, relating to education, values, status, and ‘civilisation’. One example of a poem which has neither classicized nor romanticised war is Ivor Gurney’s ‘The Silent One’. The speaker’s perspective is the opposite of Asquith’s in that ‘them’ are the officers and the implied ‘us’ are the private soldiers. Each is distinguished from the other by the way they speak. The officer laconically invites a soldier to his death with a polite ques- tion that is not a request; the man refuses in an equally coded way. The poem opposes the ‘lovely chatter’ of a rural Buckinghamshire accent, now silenced by death, with the ‘finicking’ RP of the officer. ‘Do you think you might crawl through, there; there’s a hole. [....] I’m afraid not, Sir.’ There was no hole, no way to be seen.47
Modernist Poetry It has become a critical commonplace that Modernism sought exclusivity by employing representation techniques, perspectives and structures dis- tinct from those of the dominant genre of realism, and counter to the prevailing conservative criticism.48 Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Survey of Modernist Poetry speaks of a ‘plain’ reader for whom ‘even tradi- tional poetry […] has a tendency to withdraw itself’ and for whom Modernist poetry49 makes the breach wider by its evident insult to ‘the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence.50 To this reader, ‘sophis- ticated and advanced modern poetry’ may seem to say ‘“Keep out. This is a private performance.”’ Plain readers are immediately associated with the ‘low-brow’ and the ‘lazy reading habits’ indulged by anthologies. The assumed ‘Unpopularity of Modernist poetry with the Plain Reader’, the 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 321 title of Riding and Graves’s fourth chapter, is explained by a brief history of poetry. ‘The eighteenth-century reading public had poetry made clear for it’ but to a ‘very limited recipe’, so that anyone could write poetry if they obeyed the rules.51
In the nineteenth century, because of a reading public enlarged by democracy, clearness meant not so much obeying rules as writing for the largest possible audience. The twentieth-century reaction in poetry against nineteenth- century standards is not against clearness and simplicity but against rules for poetry made by the reading public, instead of by the poets themselves.52
This is given as the reason why modern poets ‘are forced to feel themselves in snobbish sympathy with the eighteenth century’.53 Nowhere in the work is ‘the reading public’ identified with the working or lower middle classes, or even to the better and less well educated, but that reference to snobbishness references class difference. The plain reader as used by Riding and Graves is dismissed by Eugène Jolas and others in the ‘Proclamation’ issued in transition (sic) two years later. Declaration 12 reads simply ‘The plain reader be damned!’54 John Carey depicts Modernist writing as ‘a determined effort on the part of European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture’.55 It might equally be said that Modernist poets attempted to exclude poetry from mass culture. Rachel Bowlby writes that poetry, ‘restricted to a lim- ited readership of a certain class’ and not earning the poet a living wage, ‘could be identified as a place kept pure, the locus of “art for art’s sake,” uncontaminated by the profit motive or the vulgar requirements of the popular market’.56 Rainey, however, shows that although ‘the modernist project issues its claim to aesthetic dignity by repudiating that Victorian literature, above all fiction, which had sold itself to a mass reading pub- lic’,57 that repudiation might extend to the popular market but not the market entirely. Whilst only readers of a certain class and/or education might be invited to read Modernist literature texts, the Modernist material artefact, the text in print and its accompanying paratext, was very quickly commodified for profit. The issuing of a public manifesto, public battles with reviewers, the annual appearance of an anthology, for Graves and Riding makes Imagism a commercial ‘stunt’ by people ‘who wanted to be new rather than to be poets’.58 Rainey’s ‘sold itself’ is applicable here. Modernist authors such as Pound, Eliot, and Joyce capitalised on the appeal of exclusivity, but perhaps less in terms of presenting Modernist 322 S. BYRNE texts as intellectually inaccessible to the common reader than in selling commodities whose availability and price make them special and inacces- sible to most buyers. Rainey summarises the dilemma of Modernism as being unable to ‘reconstruct the aristocracy of the salon nor to to embrace the egalitarianism of the commodity’.59 The solution was ‘to reconstruct an aristocracy, but to reconstruct it within the world of the commodity’, to take advantage of the exclusivity of the small circulation of the little magazine, the growing market for first editions and rare books, and the new demand for collectable works by living authors. Rainey provides a chart of the prices, in francs, pounds, and dollars, of the three issues of the luxury first edition of Ulysses (1922). In sterling, these were £7 7s, £5, or £3 3s; in francs, 150F, 250F, and 350F; and in dollars $14, $22, and $30.60 Publication of a standard, much cheaper edition was postponed, increasing the value of these luxury editions. By April, copies of the cheap- est issue were circulating in New York at $20; by mid-June, the 150F issue was selling for 500F; by August, the cheapest issue was for sale in London at £10; by 15 August, the price was £20; and by October, over £40. These were not necessarily bought to be read and kept; they could represent a speculation for profit. Ostensibly opposing philistine commodification with a Romantic and anti-capitalist conception of the artist, Modernism: ‘[a]ccepting the collapse of art and the triumph of commodity culture […] created a new distinction within commodity culture itself, distin- guishing between commodities whose value is exhausted in immediate consumption and those whose worth is deferred or sublated into the future as investment’.61 This was a new kind of patronage, not that of ‘an aristocracy of patron-saloniers’ but ‘an elite of patron-investors’.62 More traditional patronage continued to exist but mostly disguised in the form of sinecures or posts paid at a higher than usual rate. Carey tends to conflate Modernist representations of all-pervasive exis- tential angst and anomie amounting to spiritual and sensory death and assertions that popular culture is eroding civilisation, and marginalising the intellectual, with the argument that a particular group, the culturally inferior and uneducated masses (along with the physically or mentally imperfect), should be exterminated.63 Whilst some lines of influence from Nietzsche to Yeats, Lawrence, and Hughes are clear, there is a difference between fantasies or theories of social cleansing through eugenics and defence of a perceived embattled enclave of participants in high culture. To be categorised as a passive consumer of cultural products, or within the lower term in hierarchised paradigms of educated/uneducated, intellec- 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 323 tual/non-intellectual, high culture/popular culture might not mean being consigned to sterilisation or euthanisation, or being seen as more ‘dead’ and therefore fair game for killing than those described by the upper terms of the paradigms. Nonetheless, D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) declares that ‘Humanity Needs Pruning’64 and, as Carey shows, declares ‘life’ (the driving impetus of the universe and awareness of one’s minute part in the system of life) to be more vital in himself than in a Sri Lankan or Mexican. In ‘Evil has no Dwelling-place’, industrialisation and mechanisation are represented metonymically by the wheel, the technological advance whose end product is the machines that dehumanise the deadened workers:
And men that sit in machines among spinning wheels, in an apotheosis of wheels sit in the grey mist of movement which moves not.65
Poems such as ‘City-Life’ express empathy with factory workers (‘I that am flesh of their flesh’) and sympathy for their lives (‘when I see the iron hooked into their faces […] I scream in my soul’),66 yet ‘Cry of the Masses’ describes with evident revulsion the ‘corpse-bodies’ of the working classes mindlessly working, eating, watching films.67 Whereas the subjectivity of Modernist texts has been declared inherently bourgeois by Georg Lukács and Christopher Caudwell,68 those strata of British society become the objects of particular venom in Modernist poems. Both Lawrence and Joyce wrote contemptuously about the ‘masses’ and mass culture. Lawrence deplores the effects of education in etiolating and effeminising the working-class male and the repression of vital and instinc- tual forces leading to sexual hypocrisy and ‘neurasthenia’. His critique of elementary education argues that the state encourages aspirations to non- physical, intellectual work which are unreachable by the majority of school- children. In his model, children would follow the same educational regime from the ages of 7 to 12 and then would be divided into different streams not by individual choice but by assignment.69 Only those selected by teach- ers would study Latin, French, and ‘some true science’. The rest would have their hours of education reduced and would focus on physical and domestic education, after which they would be apprenticed to a trade. These ideas receive more exposition in Lawrence’s prose, but can be seen in the poetry on English bourgeois habits and ‘niceness’. The social message of ‘Embankment at Night Before the War: Outcasts’ is not as overt as in other poems.70 The homeless people who sleep under a bridge 324 S. BYRNE are nameless but given more detail of body, face, and covering, and more humanity than the crowds who pass over the bridge (ll. 24–64), who are represented primarily as the trams and cars they ride in, and the theatre-goers, who are represented by the umbrellas they hold aloft. Though these are bright and flashing, the flowers they resemble are not poppies or daisies, but ‘infernal moly’, hellish and associated with black magic (ll. 78–79). Though they are supine and sleeping, the row of out- casts is like a row of guards, in some way protecting and upholding the society that enables theatre and cars and comfort (l. 83). Unlike the sepa- rate cars and umbrellas, the outcasts are ‘intertwined plasm’ (l. 94). ‘Red-Herring’ articulates a contempt for the bourgeois pretentions of the mother which have made the children of working-class father71 ‘in-betweens’.72
My mother was a superior soul a superior soul was she cut out to play a superior role in the god-damned bourgeoisie
‘How Beastly the Bourgeois is’ focuses its vituperation on the weak male who, faced with a new experience, a moral dilemma, goes ‘soggy, like a wet meringue’ and turns into a mess, ‘either a fool or a bully’.73 The distinction between mass civilisation and minority culture as pos- ited by Matthew Arnold pervades the work of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, Leavis taking up Lawrence’s concept of ‘life’ as a vital force that mass culture and bourgeois habits are thwarting. Williams sees the very concept of culture as divisive, emerging in the eighteenth century as a vague abstraction that establishes a further hierarchy.74 For Arnold, proximity to the ‘ideal centre of correct information, taste and intelligence’ determines the value of the ‘literary organs’ which each section of the public has. The masses are oblivious, but the intelligentsia know, because they are the ideal centre.75 Regretting the loss of rural life and unalienated labour, Leavis brings together suburbs, mass media, and commercialism, all that are ‘catering to cheap taste and conventional responses’ as agents of degenera- tion, the ebbing of ‘life’, and the demise of his imagined organic commu- nity.76 Leavis’s argument that humankind lived a more ‘natural’ life, satisfying primal human needs in a ‘primitive’ England before the divorce of workers from the primary modes of production, making their own homes and tools and artefacts, echoes Wordsworth’s and Yeats’s idealisa- tion of the peasantry and Lawrence’s of the ‘primitive’. It is refuted by 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 325
Raymond Williams, who points out that the place of the organic community in the western imaginary is the eighteenth century, but that eighteenth- century texts represent it as already gone.77 Though Leavis deplores mass culture—newspapers, advertising, mod- ern music, and film—he does not suggest that the masses cannot be edu- cated, can never participate, or may never know the wish to participate in the great tradition of literature (a synecdoche of high culture). Membership of the cultured minority who now allegedly face a hostile environment is not one of birth; Leavis entered it from outside, as did Lawrence; but one of disposition, ability, and education, which together generate discrimina- tory taste, the ability (and responsibility) to determine value. This is the cultured intelligentsia, nominally a category decathected from class. Education, by now theoretically freely available to all in Britain, makes it possible for anyone to participate, provided that they are taught in the ‘right’ way by the right teachers, who will pass on the understanding of the moral and other values embodied in literature as a synecdoche of cul- ture. If the distinction between minority intellectual and majority mass would seem not to be based on class, or at least not on childhood class, the fear seems to be of the half-educated. The masses’ possession of the combined weapons of literacy and spending power will lead to a degenera- tion of published writing. This develops from the Romantic anxieties about the ‘public’ discussed earlier and is articulated in this form as early as 1833 and as late as 1942. Edward Bulwer-Lytton in England and the English attributed the alleged profusion of superficial material published during the early 1830s to ‘the increased number of readers, and compared English literary culture unfavourably with French, on the basis that French society had lower levels of literacy and therefore the sophisticated reading public required a ‘more elevated and refined tone’.78 G.M. Trevelyan deplored the consequence of the 1870 Education Act on the grounds that the agricultural labourer could read and write, but unfortunately that power was not directed towards a love of ‘country life’ and the ‘feudal’ relationships approved in earlier pages of his work.79 Free state education was ‘devised and inspected by city folk intent on producing not peasants but clerks’. It has produced a population able to read but unable to judge between what is worth reading and what is not, ‘an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals’.80 Because since 1870 they have catered to millions of ‘half- and quarter-educated people, whose forebears, not able to read at all, were not patrons of newspapers or books’, and because ‘the small highly educated class no longer sets the standard that it used to do’, litera- ture and journalism are debased. This suggests that nice discrimination, 326 S. BYRNE though not precisely inherited, cannot be acquired in one generational bound, but requires the environment of a generations-established social position—class. Michael Whitworth sets out the argument that Modernity devalues poetry because it values only that which produces material ends.
Quantitative knowledge is valued more highly than qualitative, because it deals with the practically orientated, measurable aspects of the physical world. Science is valued in so far as it promises technological or medical breakthroughs, but distrusted when it is simply a realm of abstract specula- tion. Culture, as a realm of unregulated play, is treated unsympathetically by instrumental reason, but the culture industry, as the manufacturer of culture products, has a definite material aim in mind, and is welcomed. From this point of view, the newly literate audiences marginalized poetry because to them language was a means to an end: utterances were valued according to their content, their “message,” not their beauty or their ugliness.81
Modernity in this interpretation is equated with the newly literate; theirs is the outlook that applies instrumental rationality to culture and under- values the realm of the aesthetic. The ‘subtleties of poetry’ are appreciated only by the class which has a long history of literacy, or perhaps, given that, as has been seen, there exists a long history of working-class literacy, the class which has a long history of knowledge and study of a wide range of canonical texts.82 The Waste Land clearly articulates contempt for the class seen as aspiring above its place and aping, unsuccessfully, its betters. In the episode of loveless sex between the house agent’s clerk and the typist, it does so through the material. The interrupted sonnet characterises the clerk as one upon whom assurance sits like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The image is vivid and compact but sneering. The tenor of the simile is a personification (assurance sits), the vehicle two metonyms (silk hat and Bradford millionaire). The Bradford millionaire stands for new money from industry and trade, the silk hat for the morning-dress-wearing upper class. The implication is obviously that the clerk’s assurance is feigned and unnatural, like silk hats on the nou- veau riche, which do not convey the cachet intended, whereas both come naturally to the upper classes. The double trope, however, further distances the clerk from self-confidence and its outward show in upper-class taste. Pound’s imperative ‘Make it new’ was in a sense more fully obeyed by the poets of the subsequent generation than by the contemporaries of Eliot who imitated him. D.J. Enright, writing of the poets of a yet later generation, wrote of Eliot and Joyce that they ‘attracted too many ready and naïve 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 327 pupils’ and that after the master has brilliantly and persuasively shown the sterility and corruption of the modern world, ‘there is little to be gained from watching his pupils as they fastidiously pick up some fragment or other or and remark on the fact that it is both broken and dirty’.83 Enright dis- misses Auden and Spender, and in some ways the poetry of the 1930s con- tinues to remark on the brokenness and dirtiness of the world, but in their left-wing politics and their engagement with class, they are of interest here.
Auden and the 1930s Left-wing and leftish liberal writers of the 1930s benefitted from outlets made available by magazines such as Experiment (1928–1930), New Verse (1932), Cambridge Left (1933–1934), Left Review (1934–1938), Storm (1933–1934), The Wanderer (1933–1934), New Writing (book format) (1936–1950), and Twentieth-Century Verse (1937–1939), as well as anthologies such as New Signatures (1933), and the Left Book Club (from 1936). Douglas Jefferies’s manifesto editorial for Storm sets out the requirements for an anti-bourgeois ‘journal of Modern Literature’ por- traying contemporary thought and action, an adversarial alternative to the mainstream and popular. Obviously,
there must be two Modern Literatures: one portraying the thoughts and actions of a decaying Bourgeoisie, and another portraying the struggle towards the new world of Socialism. In this country, what is generally called Modern Literature is of the first kind: much is fantastic, weird stunt-writing, intended to amuse the bored members of the leisured classes; much again, while dealing with working-class themes, is anti-socialist in effect because it leads towards self-pity or quiescence. Storm is the first magazine of Socialist Fiction to be published in this country. We intend it to contain stories, sketches, poems and illustrations depicting all phases of the struggle, a virile and progressive counter-blast to the reams of counter-revolutionary dope that are contained in other organs of popular fiction.84
Communist manifestoes and articles on radical ideas in literary magazines attack the insufficiently committed and are in turn attacked from within as well as without. As D.E.S. Maxwell points out, C. Day Lewis represented those not fully committed in terms of ghosts, the only kind who can live ‘Between two fires’; the neutral liberal is dismissed as ‘a saunterer on bat- tlefields’ who ‘cannot expect his peregrinations to last’ in William Plomer’s ‘Epitaph for a Contemporary’; D.S. Mirski accused Grigson’s New Verse of 328 S. BYRNE
‘systematically hounding Day Lewis for what it regarded as an excess of communist loyalty’; Grigson attacked Day Lewis for ‘pimping to the mass bourgeois mind’ in joining the selection panel of The Book Society; Auden is accused of demonstrating ‘the aloofness of the intellectual’ and of falsi- fying the perspective of social development and delaying the re-integration of the poet into the body of society’.85 Whether the writers known as the poets of the 1930s or the Auden gen- eration are categorised as ‘the second generation of modernism’86 or as a revolutionary break from the modernist preoccupations and forms, or indeed as any kind of homogeneous movement or group, the work of W.H. Auden (1907–1973), Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972), and Stephen Spender (1909–1995) exhibits some shared characteristics. It critiques contemporary politics, represents a decaying, debased society: ‘this country of ours where nobody is well’, and espouses causes and sympathies associated with Communism. The poets were not all members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, or all entirely and unde- viatingly in tune with Communist, Marxist, or Soviet orthodoxies. The political activities they undertook were anti-fascist and focused on Italy, Germany, and Spain rather than interventions in the British class system.87 Auden’s shifting and ambivalent stance on left-wing politics and the class system is well documented by Adrian Caesar, who argues that, like Lawrence, ‘Auden perceived industrialisation and all that had followed from it’ as bringing degeneration. He praised a limestone landscape, but also published lines which rejected Romantic idealisation of the country- side to celebrate the urban and modern. In ‘Letter to Lord Byron’:
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.
And
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.
In ‘Get there if you can’, the modernity is not the shiny chrome, plate glass, and plastic of the twentieth century but of the Industrial Revolution: coal, iron, steam, now in ruin.
Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 329
Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run.
Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals, Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails. (ll. 1–4)
Material and societal decay are blamed on the betrayers:
At the theatre, playing tennis, driving motor cars we had, In our continental villas, mixing cocktails for a cad. These were boon companions who devised their legends for our tombs, Those who have betrayed us nicely while we took them to our rooms. (ll. 15–18)
As often in Auden’s work, the pronouns are slippery; the plural pronoun here is inclusive and opposed to ‘them’, so that the speaker is included in the final adjuration, but the imperative suggests otherwise: the order is to drop ‘those priggish ways’ and don’t behave like a ‘stone’.
If we really want to live, we’d better start to try; If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die. (ll. 51–54)
Many earlier poems, influenced by theories connecting psychological and physical states, analyse, diagnose, and correct society’s erring individuals. ‘Auden regarded large sections of the middle classes as psychologically and spiritually diseased, hypocritical and morally bankrupt.’88 Capitalism and inequality are attacked but in non-specific images, personification, and abstraction.
Greed showing shamelessly her naked money, And all Love’s wondering eloquence debased To a collector’s slang, Smartness in furs, And Beauty scratching miserably for food.89 330 S. BYRNE
Auden was firm that he could not join the Communist Party of Great Britain because ‘I am bourgeois’.90 Auden’s insistence that he came from the ‘professional’ middle class, repeated as late as 197191, can be seen as an attempt to differentiate himself from those sections. In ‘The Cave of Making’,92 addressing his late friend Louis MacNeice, he states that
Though neither of our dads, like Horace’s wiped his nose on his forearm, neither was porphyry-born, and our ancestors probably were among those plentiful subjects it cost less money to murder. (ll. 30–34)
The art that MacNeice and Auden shared is neither commercial nor patronised. He notes that it is a privilege to serve ‘this unpopular art’
which cannot be turned into background noise for study or hung as status-trophy by rising executives. (ll. 72–76)
Another poem describes the impossibility of the middle-class man becom- ing integrated in the working class.93
I have a handsome profile I’ve been to a great public school I’ve a little money invested Then why do I feel such a fool (ll. 1–4) [….] I’ll get a job in a factory I’ll live with working boys I’ll play them at darts in the public houseI’ll share their sorrows and joys (ll. 26–29)
A second voice warns that ‘they’ will not tell ‘you’ their secrets, even as you pay for their drinks. They will tell lies:
For they know you for what you are (l. 34) 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 331
Though avowedly anti-fascist, Auden’s poetry exhibits ‘misogyny, the interest in strong leadership and the address to a small elite group [which] all tend in that direction’.94 For Caesar, Auden struggles ‘to position himself as a middle-class dissenter who nevertheless couldn’t make common cause with either the working class or the aristocracy’.95 He retains, in his own words, ‘the public school boy’s attitude to the working class and the not-quite-quite [which] has altered very little since the war. He is taught to be fairly kind and polite, provided of course they return the compliment, but their lives and needs remain as remote to him as those of another species.’ It is worth noting, however, that The Liberal Fascist is about the public schools’ mass production of ‘gentle- men’ who are referred to as ‘they’. Though the narrator of ‘As We Like it’96 adopts the high perspective like a narrator of an eighteenth-century locodescriptive poem, looking down on the masses’ ‘byres of poverty’ (l. 1), it is part of an ‘Us’, not part of the ‘They’ who ‘showed us what our vanity had chosen,/ Who pursued understanding with patience’ and ‘unlearnt/ Our hatred’ (ll. 9–11). That ‘us’ becomes ‘them’, however, in ‘At the Grave of Henry James’.97 The poem refers to ‘squat women of the saurian brain’ excited to a mob by ‘torches and snare-drum’ (ll. 67–68) and finds James true to ‘the rare noblesse’ of his lucid gift, ignoring the
Resentful muttering Mass.
Whose ruminant hatred of all which cannot Be simplified or stolen is still at large. (ll. 100–104)
These images suggest the description of the mud architecture and mud moving inhabitants of Chandrapore in the mock-imperial memoir/travel- ogue of Forster’s A Passage to India—without the satire. Caesar provides many examples of the poems’ prejudices and sneering comments describ- ing the ugliness, stupidity, and cattle-like characteristics of the masses, in particular ‘as Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily/ denser.’98 The poems articulate a number of positions, from magisterial and authoritative Son of Empire to Communist, often ironically. Auden engages in the same kind of play, posturing, and masquerade as Byron, 332 S. BYRNE identified by John Lucas as an Auden forebear.99 ‘Brothers, who when the sirens roar’, initially titled ‘A Communist to Others’ takes on the persona of a Communist possibly Shop Unionist, addressing workers caught in the wage-trap and deadened by popular culture, with little by sex as an alter- native entertainment.100
Brothers, who when the sirens roar From office, shop and factory pour [....] By cops directed to the fug Of talkie-houses for a drug Or down canals for a hug (ll. 1–6)
When this speaker addresses the ruling class, however, the regis- ter changes:
O splendid person, you who stand In spotless flannels or with hand Expert on trigger; Whose lovely hair and shapely limb Year after year are kept in trim Till buffers envy as you swim Your Grecian figure: (ll. 29–35)
Unless certain sections of The Orators are read with a satirised narrator in mind, they show nothing but contempt for the proles:
see what they’re at—our proletariat. What are they doing Their minds as pathic as a boxer’s face, Ashamed, uninteresting, and hopeless race.
Short rhyming couplets, monosyllabic and feminine rhymes, and rhe- torical questions perhaps aim at a Byronic or Popean effect. Auden wrote that the interest he took in Marx was akin to the interest he took in Freud: ‘as a technique of unmasking middle-class ideologies, not with the intention of repudiating our ideas, but with the hope of 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 333 becoming better bourgeois’.101 He expresses amused astonishment, how- ever, at the alleged declassé interest in the occult of another great bour- geois poet, Yeats.
How could Yeats with his great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ances- tral houses, ceremonious tradition, take up something so essentially lower- middle-class—or should I say Southern Californian—so ineluctably associated with suburban villas and clearly unattractive faces? A. E. Housman’s pessimistic stoicism seems to me nonsense too, but at least it is a kind of nonsense that can be believed by a gentleman.
Yeats not only had an aesthetic appreciation for these but also identified with them. He proclaimed his class affiliations in linking his name with those of Lady Augusta Gregory and John Synge, asserting that all the trio did
Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus like grew strong. We three alone in modern times had brought Everything down to that sole test again, Dream of the noble and beggar-man.102
This aligns Yeats with the ascendancy or gentry and the sons of soil, the peasantry, through Ascendancy landownership, and distances him from the mercantile classes, though he was not a landowner and the Yeats and Pollexfens were clergy, lawyers, merchants, and businessmen. To be fair, the lines to the fathers that introduce Responsibilities (1914) do not cite any aristocratic ancestor, but address merchant, scholar, and soldier.103 Nonetheless, the Yeats/Butler blood is said not to ‘through any huckster’s loin’ (l. 8). George Moore gives an account of Yeats raging against the middle class for their reluctance to pay to house Hugh Lane’s bequest of Impressionist paintings. Yeats is said to have thundered, stamped his feet, and worked himself up into a temper.
It is impossible to imagine the hatred that came into his voice when he spoke the words ‘the middle classes’; one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe […. and] we looked around asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up such 334 S. BYRNE
extraordinary ideas […] the ridiculous idea that none but titled and carriage folk can appreciate pictures. And we asked ourselves why Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce the class to which he himself belonged essentially: on one side excellent mercantile millers and shipowners, and on the other a portrait-painter of distinction.104
Anxieties attendant upon the gradual erosion of the holdings and power of the Protestant Ascendancy and the increasing power of the Catholic majority may have fuelled the attempted consolidation of interests as well as the vituperation. Moore further recalls Yeats insisting that he should have been Duke of Ormande, a claim countered by George Russell, who pointed out, firstly, that Yeats’s father was still living and, secondly, that ‘we both belong to the lower middle classes’. Yeats’s pretentions, or delu- sions, are manifest in the proud possession of spoons bearing the Butler crest’; Moore remarks that ‘all romantic poets have sought illustrious ancestry’.105 Yeats’s well-known poem on the failure of a wealthy man to subscribe a second time to the municipal gallery emphasises the proper function of the wealthy and titled as patrons of the arts, by reference to the Duke of Ercole and Guidobaldi, and whilst dismissing the lower classes as ‘Paudeens’ and ‘Biddies’ whose interest or indifference to art is immaterial.106
After the Second World War: Arts for All? In 1940, George Orwell could argue that the real proletariat in Britain existed only in heavy industry and on the land and that the difference between the possessions and habits of the factory worker and the profes- sional had become imperceptible.107 The education available to the prole- tariat following the 1870 Education Act had made a genuine proletariat literature almost unattainable. Middle-class writers might write about the working class, but they were not of it, and working-class writers, in Orwell’s view, were alienated from the working class. A working-class man who writes about his experience of poverty will be a proletarian who doesn’t want to be one. He will write in a bourgeois manner and in a middle-class dialect. He may be a good writer, and the act of getting working-class experience and values into print is valuable, but he is no longer a working man, merely a ‘black sheep’ of the bourgeoisie. For Orwell, whilst the bourgeoisie remain dominant, literature will be bourgeois. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 335
If ‘much of the poetry in the canon of English literature can also be read as writing produced by and about a particular class and gender [and will] produce “universal meanings” only for those who define the univer- sal in the image of that class and gender’,108 the products of high culture are inextricable from the voices and values of the upper and upper middle classes, and education in ‘artistic values’ perpetuates upper- and upper- middle-class values, then aspirants from the working classes are likely to assimilate those values as they rise socially. The hegemony of the dominant class is not absolute; however, there is always counter-hegemony. During the 1930s to 1950s, the counter-hegemonic works in poetry came from within, not from the very highest strata of society but from the upper middle class. These, however, resemble Christopher Butler’s anti- bourgeois bourgeois, ‘who accepts society more or less as it is, while at the same time entertaining a set of intellectual and artistic notions which are contradicted by his actual behaviour’.109 As Sinfield notes:
Tom Nairn denounces the politics of middle-class dissidence as nostalgic and gestural: it has been ‘anti-machine, anti-money, and anti-city. It was not—of course—antibourgeois, or designed to impede the serious accumu- lation of capital. […] It never intended to stop England becoming the world’s workshop; but it did aim to inject into that fate as high a degree of conservative stability and rank as history would permit’.110
At the same time, the development of the Welfare State, the expansion of the lower- and middle-middle class, and the increasing commercial impor- tance of popular culture, latterly especially teen popular culture, generated fear for the status of high culture, and a way of life. In Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, the realistic threat to British life is not a proletarian take- over or even a totalitarian regime like that of Nineteen Eighty-Four but a flattened, history-less, homogeneous suburban low culture.
In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old pattern is gradually changing [….] There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.111 336 S. BYRNE
Orwell’s association of this emergent working-class-cum-lower-middle- class culture with consumerism, the moribund, and the anti-aesthetic can be seen in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy,112 though Hoggart later modified this, and it was to be challenged and further modified by Raymond Williams in his attempts to define just what constitutes working- class culture.113 From the late 1930s, state involvement in the means of production of cultural products became official policy. In addition to the paternalistic endeavour of exposing the masses to a better class of culture, this also enabled the filtering out of material considered antithetical to high morale or likely to cause ‘alarm and despondency’ during the Second War World. The British Council was established in 1938, and during and immediately after the war Ministry of Information film unit, CEMA [the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts], the BBC third programme (1946), the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and Artists for War, and the Arts Council (1945) came into being. Some saw this as affording huge possibilities for the democratisation of British culture. Utopian predictions of a classless post-war society of shared culture were published by, for example, Virginia Woolf in 1940 and Herbert Read in 1941. The election of Labour governments in 1945 and 1950 escalated fears of culture being appropriated by a workers’ state, and in particular of the narrowing of art to ideals of Society realism: narratives of poverty, suffering, and political struggle culminating in a workers’ triumph. Aneurin Bevan writes that those ‘whose habits and possessions are bound up with the vanishing social order are filled with pessimism’ (p. 98), but sees the move from private commission to public expenditure on the arts as positive. He antic- ipates the ‘emancipation’ of artists, ‘restored to their proper relationship with civic life’ (pp. 50–51). The opposite view is described by Nigel Nicolson in reference to the fears of his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson:
they both believed that the world which they knew and loved would be irreparably broken by the war. They saw in it the end of les douceurs de la vie, represented by [their houses] Sissinghurst and King’s Bench Walk. They thought that their past life of literature, Bloomsbury, ‘the purchase of books and pictures and the unthinking enjoyment of food and wine’, a large gar- den and sufficient servants, was now ‘an obsolete tradition’. They feared the permanence of the new vulgarity which the war had introduced. ‘I have always been on the side of the under-dog’, wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘but I 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 337
have also believed in the principle of aristocracy. I have hated the rich, but I have loved learning, scholarship, intelligence and the humanities. Suddenly I am faced with the fact that all these lovely things are supposed to be “class privileges”’. ‘We shall have to walk and live a Woolworth life hereafter. [….] I hate the destruction of elegance’.114
Sinfield sees Harold Nicolson as ‘a typical middle-class dissident of the period’:
he felt with the poor and hated the rich but loved learning, scholarship, intelligence and the humanities. He could not imagine a social order that would reconcile those principles, or a creativity that might draw upon other social, political, economic, human resources. This was the ethos of Bloomsbury, which remained the reference point for literary intellectuals. Bloomsbury ‘appealed to the supreme value of the civilised individual, whose pluralisation, as more and more civilised individuals, was itself the only acceptable social direction’.115
Lady Violet Bonham Carter is similarly in favour of state support for the arts but concerned about the kind of art that will result, since ‘the leisure and money of the “privileged” have guarded and preserved for the few much that was rare, precious, and lovely. Whether or not the essential qualities of these values can survive intact, when they are shared by the man, remains to be seen’. Neither shared classless nor Soviet-style culture emerged. Those appointed to the boards of these state-funded organisations were mostly taken by men of a certain social standing who became gatekeepers of funding and there- fore of culture. The Labour government, described by Sinfield as composed mostly of middle-class dissidents ‘brought up in the old middle-class man- ner’ adopted ‘a rapid option for conventional capitalist priorities—the refusal to finance the documentary film movement was an example’.116 Sinfield notes that the Arts Council charter included a responsibility ‘in particular to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public through- out Our Realm’ and to cooperate with other public bodies to develop ‘a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts’.117 However, most of the money was committed immediately to turning Covent Garden, which had been a palais de danse run by Mecca with a two-month opera season, and of which Keynes was also chairman, into an international opera and ballet house. Even so, Keynes hoped that Covent Garden would justify its subsidy in popular terms by performing ‘at least a 338 S. BYRNE month of Gilbert and Sullivan every year’. In June 1947 officers were still urging that ‘the Council must not lose sight of its mandate to make the fine arts easily accessible to every section of the population’.118 But by 1951 the Secretary-General was proposing: ‘In reconsidering the exhorta- tion of its Charter to “Raise and Spread” [appreciation of the arts,] the Council may decide for the time being to emphasise the first more than the second word’.119 Generally, popular possibilities were cut back—pro- motions in Butlin’s holiday camps, small exhibitions in schools, canteens, shops and factories, symphony concerts at one shilling a head, regional initiatives, local arts clubs. Sinfield finds an ‘inegalitarian bias in cultural provision’ deriving from ‘better resourcing for middle-class consumers, and cultural assumptions that freeze out and discriminate against the lower classes, ethnic groups, women’.120 He cites a study which shows that in 1976 the most affluent 20% of households benefitted from over 40% of public expenditure on theatres, sporting events, and other entertainments, whilst the poorest 25% received only 4%.121 He notes that despite the orthodoxy of egalitari- anism, the middle classes are favoured, benefitting from subsidies ‘both as producers (cultural institutions employ many middle-class people) and as consumers. Middle-class culture is organized, by and large, from within the ethos of that class, whereas lower-class culture, in the market, is often organized by entrepreneurs with allegiances elsewhere’. The response to working-class writers by the gatekeepers steeped in high culture from early youth, and perhaps more so by upper- and middle- middle class successful aspirants, was not a conscious Nietzschean project of eradication of the masses122 but a perhaps unanalysed or subconscious bias. When there is an official policy of democratisation, widening partici- pation, or Arts for all, there remains a structure of feeling that the lower- class poet is an upstart, a simulacrum at best, a wrecker at worst. An example of this is given by Peter Womack in a discussion of an entry in the diary of Harold Nicolson from 1941.123
Dylan Thomas comes to see me. He wants a job on the B.B.C. He is a fat little man, puffy and pinkish, dressed in very dirty trousers and a loud check coat. I tell him that if he is to be employed by the B.B.C., he must promise not to get drunk. I give him £1, as he is clearly at his wits’ end for money. He does not look as if he had been cradled into poetry by wrong. He looks as if he will be washed out of poetry by whisky.124 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 339
Womack notes that Nicolson refers to Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo: ‘Most wretched men/ Are cradled into poetry by wrong,/ They learn in suffering what they teach in song’.125 Womack finds ‘an unspoken verbal joke’ here based on two perceptions of Dylan Thomas: he is ‘“wretched” in a middle-class colloquial sense, as if Nicolson is saying “I couldn’t get the wretched man out of my office”’. He also exhibits lowness‘ : the vulgar jacket, the seediness, the undignified cadging. He is wretched in a sense closer to Shelley’s: hapless, poverty-stricken’. Womack concludes that the allusion expresses, ‘through its mildly malicious literary wit’, Nicolson’s ‘socially based proprietorship. Literature may occasionally be produced by wretches, but it routinely belongs to gentlemen’. Nicolson’s social and literary connections, Womack writes, explain the ‘tranquil air of entitle- ment with which he confronts’ the poet.
The fat man with the dirty trousers may be a genius, and the gentlemanly author may be a mediocrity: Nicolson is self-deprecatingly open to both possibilities. But they do not alter the fact that he enjoys the freedom of the city of literature and Thomas does not.
Nicolson’s governership of the BBC ‘emerges seamlessly from the inter- woven social and cultural affiliations’ of his life as a member of the govern- ing class, a governor by nature. He is at home in literature as if it were part of his estate. As an example of Nicolson’s sense of himself and his role at the BBC as a guardian of culture, a bastion against its debasement, Womack gives an extract from a letter to Lady Violet Bonham Carter. Nicolson warns that ‘we’ are about to enter a time when old and precious values will be discarded and that the press will not ‘swim against the tide of vulgarization which will sweep in from the west’. He asserts that ‘[o]nly the B.B.C. can teach the public to think correctly, to feel nobly, to enjoy themselves intelligently, to have some conception of what is meant by the good life. Our responsibility is tremendous. I do not want to shirk that responsibility’. He does not have confidence even in the staff of BBC, since in conveying this mission to them, ‘I have to introduce words and concepts of which they have no understanding at all. They remain com- pletely unaware of what we mean when we talk of the B.B.C.’s unerring instinct for the second-rate’.126 Womack points out the ‘inextricable mix of social and ethical languages’ in this, seeing ‘noble’ and ‘good’ versus ‘vul- gar’ and ‘second-rate’ as double-coded, denoting a particular class as well as universal qualities. He argues that nobility is a virtue that anyone could 340 S. BYRNE rise to but also a distinction from which most are excluded. Concomitantly, Nicolson regards the BBC’s mission as to disseminate nobility, but at the same time complains that his fellow governors don’t understand what he does.
He is arguing for an excellence that pertains to humanity in general, but is also the possession of a small, threatened elite. The endangered ‘old values’ are spiritual and material at once: traditional principles and agricultural rents.
Here and elsewhere, Nicolson is clear about the economic conditions of the virtues he admires. He fears, according to Womack, for the fate of generosity, honour, ease, elegance, good taste, and respect for tradition in the ‘Woolworth life’ that will follow the war. For Nicolson, these qualities are based on
indefensibly unequal distribution of wealth. Trying to characterise some elderly neighbours at Sissinghurst whose ‘dignity and distinction’ he loves, he says they convey a ‘sense of mahogany and silver and peaches and port- wine and good manners’: it is typical that he evokes an ethos by listing expen- sive substances.127
This materialism is also to the fore as Nicholson records a conversation with a young man hoping to become Bodley’s Librarian. He warns that the post ‘meant much more than firelight on books. It meant dining at Worcester high-table on Sunday off cold pork; it meant walking in the Parks with the sub-Librarian; it meant a little house in North Oxford, and a bicycle’.128 Womack comments that ‘Nicolson’s prose, usually quite undogmatic, is mercilessly firm about how miserable it would be not to be rich. He sees without mystification that his literary and intel- lectual enjoyments, no less than his culinary ones, are grounded in eco- nomic privilege’. That Thomas is more widely read and esteemed than Nicolson might seem to provide a nice coda to the story, but this is not precisely a fairy tale of the working-class boy triumphing over the baron. Womack points out that while Thomas’s background was not patrician, his voice sounds nei- ther Welsh nor working-class, but employs the vowels and clipped end- ings of RP. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 341
Womack’s example from Thomas’s poetry, the opening of ‘Fern Hill’, matches the voice in its lexis of pastoral and country-house poem:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green [....] Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
The terms ‘Golden’, ‘honoured’, and ‘lordly’ make ‘the prince of the apple towns’ like a ‘baroque swain, an aristocrat at the same time as he is a peasant’, and the objects, ‘most of them indefinitely and as it were lav- ishly plural […] combine to suggest an inexhaustible bounty—not a prac- tical prosperity, which Fern Hill seems in fact to have lacked, but fabulous wealth’. Womack concludes that the poem’s ‘“lordly” way with language forms a sort of gilded frame round the commonplace picture’. Given Thomas’s father’s background, a ‘tangle of accomplishments and frustra- tions’, Womack finds, ‘class, education and poetry are repeatedly standing in for one another’. Therefore, ‘when his son presents himself in Harold Nicolson’s office, his entrance is not after all the intrusion of an alien prin- ciple. The two men are standing on widely separated rungs, but it is the same ladder’. Nicolson’s attitude to Thomas is interesting given his diary entry about a poetry reading by Auden in August 1933. Nicolson writes that he fol- lows Auden ‘in his derision of patriotism, class distinctions, comfort, and all the ineptitudes of the middle-classes’.129 However, when Auden ‘derides the other soft little harmless things which make my life comfortable, I feel a chill autumn wind’. Whilst Auden ‘makes one feel terribly discontented with one’s own smug successfulness’, he goes to bed ‘feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number’, yet he is ‘delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist’.
The Movement Childs and Horne quote from statistics showing self-identification by class compiled in 1948:130 2% assigned themselves to the upper class, 6% to the upper middle, 28% to the middle, 13% to the lower middle, and 46% to 342 S. BYRNE the working class (5% did not reply). They note that high taxation reduced the economic power of the upper middle class whilst the bargaining power of threats of industrial action and lower unemployment raised the working- class standard of living. They see a reflection of small shifts in class power related to the enlarging centre of the middle class and aspirant working class in the number of first publications by middle-class poets and ‘in the intention of academics such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to study working-class and popular culture’.131 The Movement poets born about a decade after the Auden generation have been categorised not by a manifesto but by their (assumed) social identity, that is, within the 47% of lower- or middle-middle class, in oppo- sition to the upper-middle- or upper-class poets of the 1930s. Their class status comes from their parents, their education, and their occupation (teachers in state or less prestigious schools or new universities). Early reviews define the Movement poets in opposition to their allegedly higher- class predecessors. John Holloway, in an influential review of three new works by Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, and Robert Conquest, contrasts the (alleged) upper-class origins of the left-wing 1930s poets with the ‘typical “Movement” writer’s childhood background [which] appears to be lower middle-class and suburban’.132 For Holloway, ‘the crucial point is that he is on the whole staying there’, there being the Midlands or North and the middle classes. Whilst this homogenises a diverse group, it is not unfounded, and it places the poets within a class seen as newly empowered and effecting a kind of class action. For Donald Davie the Movement has sociological importance:
[F]or the first time a challenge is thrown down, not by individuals like Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Dylan Thomas, but by a more or less coherent group, to the monopoly of British culture sustained for generations by the London haut-bourgeois.133
Anthony Hartley’s Spectator review finds the Movement poetry ‘dissent- ing’ and ‘non-conformist; ‘the poetic equivalent of liberal dissenting England [….] A liberalism egalitarian and anti-aristocratic’.134 The extent to which the group was coherent and had a sociopolitical agenda is as debateable as its constitution. Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain have been considered to be the core members,135 but other poets appear in other anthologies and studies, and their writ- 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 343 ing is characterised as much by differences as similarities. The Spectator article that introduced the term ‘Movement’ describes the members as ‘sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, threatened world which doesn’t look, anyway, as if it’s going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of young English writers’.136 In contrast to the ‘hollow technical pirouettes’137 and ‘Id Romanticism’138 of Dylan Thomas, and the New Romanticism of the Apocalypse, the Movement poets use direct and colloquial speech; in contrast to the 1930s poets, they tend to avoid ekphrasis, and quotation; they reject the perceived grandiosity and obscurity of Modernism, refus- ing ‘to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language’139 and embrace the quotidian. Nonetheless, the poems do allude to other authors, texts, paintings, for example, Donne (Kingsley Amis, ‘Something Nasty in the Bookshop’, Donald Davie, ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’140), Herrick (Donald Davie, ‘Cherry Ripe’141), E.M. Forster (D.J. Enright, ‘The Interpreters’),142 Pope (Donald Davie, ‘Too late For Satire’143); John Holloway seems to reject both Yeats and Auden in ‘His Epitaph for a Man’:
Take notice. This neglected stone bears no request (Stranger, friend, passer-by)144
Whilst representing upper-class characters as pretentious, effete, and sneering, Movement fiction does not romanticise its working-class and lower-middle-class protagonists. Writing about their own work, the authors downplay the extent of class-consciousness or class-based agenda: ‘the social element in what I write has largely been invented by reviewers’; ‘In 1940 our impulse was still to minimize social differences rather than to exaggerate them’; they ‘were inclined to approach the question of social class as, say, George Orwell approached it, rather than as a piece of Elastoplast that must, with delighted masochism, be pulled off every twenty-four hours’.145 This resistance to the perceived overplaying of class can be seen in reviews of later poetry, that of Tony Harrison, for example, but Movement poetry, like Movement fiction, signifies class in many ways. Holloway suggests that whereas the Auden generation wrote about the working classes from without, taking the stance of a bard and speaking across a gap as it were through a loud-hailer, Donald Davie’s poems show a ‘quiet, respectful noticing, from right close up or even inside’.146 Davie’s description of artisan’s houses is close up in a photographic sense, but it is 344 S. BYRNE as detached from the inhabitants as a civic surveyor’s report. Amis’s ‘Nocturne’ denies a couple fondling in a shop entrance the sureness and economy of animals.147
These keep the image of another creature In crippled versions, cocky, drab and stewed; What beast holds off its paw to gesture, Or gropes towards being understood? (ll. 12–15)
John Wain in ‘Who Speaks my Language III’148 asks:
who can follow my drift if he need toil at no craft? Yet, once dragged out from behind his bank balance and bound to earn his bread by a trade, be it ledger or lathe, he sinks to a level of drabness beyond reach of my joy or my sadness.
In ‘Who Speaks my Language IV’,149 Wain addresses the question of how far
You can expect the Common Man to share Your own concern with words and what they are (ll. 2–3) [….] You dare not speak too primly or concisely Because your hearers for their simple needs Feel that a few crass gestures will do nicely. (ll. 7–9)
Enright makes the most class-conscious statement, reflecting on pre-war prejudice, as a woman stops him in the street to tell him:
(With a loudness I supposed was upper-class) That Cambridge was not for the likes of me, nor was Long hair, nor the verse I wrote for the school mag. He concludes, however, that her sentiments are also those of the working class.
Unanimity on basic questions Accounts for why we never had the revolution.150 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 345
Morrison locates what he sees as the Movement provincialism (as opposed to regionalism), insularity (Enright and Gunn are obvious exceptions, and Conquest was educated at Grenoble and worked for the Foreign Office in Sofia and New York), and philistinism in the social and geographical origins of the members, finding envy of wealthy travellers, contempt for the sentimental and idealising, resentment of the South of England, and an anti-metropolitanism (though Amis was born and went to school in London), even though Movement texts ‘trace not a move- ment out of and away from London but into and towards it.151 Writing during the 1950s, Enright describes this as a difficult time for poetry, but also
a conspicuously self-conscious age, and so various official aids are springing up in an attempt to cope with the melancholy situation. In Britain the Arts Council sponsors numerous poetry recitals: a useful policy but clearly […] a long-term one. Moreover a Poetry Book Society has recently been formed [by T.S. Eliot in 1953], which supports four new books of verse in every year by giving them a guaranteed sale.152
Enright points out that this tends to canalise what interest there is in poetry, making it harder for other published works. Nonetheless, Enright continues, this should not worry poets, who should be content with a very small readership. He has no truck with the ‘moans of the intelligentsia’ about popular and working-class culture. ‘Poetry will survive television as it has survived cinema and radio and newspapers and bad novels—and as, earlier, it survived bear-baiting, cock-fighting, the tobacco-smoking which Ben Jonson complained of’.153 Enright’s anthology gives a short piece by each poet on poetry generally and his or poetry specifically. Philip Larkin (1922–1985) is the only poet to introduce a note of class awareness or snobbery. In asserting that every poem should be ‘its own sole freshly cre- ated universe’, he writes that has no belief in ‘“tradition” or a common myth-kitty or causal allusions in poems to other poems or poets’. The last he finds, ‘unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people’.154 One of Larkin’s poems included in the anthology, ‘At Grass’, is selected by A. Alvarez as an example of the ‘gentility’ against which his New Poetry stands. Alvarez refers to the poems of the firstNew Lines anthology (with some exceptions) as ‘academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledge- able, efficient, polished, and in its quiet way, even intelligent’.155 This sug- 346 S. BYRNE gests middle class, as does the description of Larkin’s persona in ‘Church Going’ as ‘just like the man next door’.156 The poems are accused of por- traying English culture as static, apart from a few minor changes of social distinctions. The upper-middle-class Tory ideals have been replaced by ‘lower-middle-class, or Labour, ideal of the Movement and the Angries, but the concept of gentility still reigns supreme’.157 In an echo of Arnold and Leavis, the assertion is that ‘genteel and enisled’ poetry is disregarding the ‘forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civiliza- tion’.158 A number of poets included in New Lines and Poetry of the 50’s also contributed to Alvarez’s anthology, some contributed the same poems, and many of those contributors have the same education and the same occupations. Few of the poems touch on class, and none represent changes in the British class structure. Poems by R.S. Thomas describe Welsh farmers,159 D.J. Enright writes about trishaw drivers and noodle- vendors in ‘The Poor Wake up Quickly’ and ‘The Noodle Vendor’s Flute’.160 David Holbrook’s ‘Living? Our Supervisors Will Do That For Us!’ speaks of a ‘scholarship boy from the slums’ who imitates his, pre- sumably middle-class supervisor, changes, leaves academia, and becomes better off than the academic. Following the 1944 Education Act, the younger poets included in Alvarez’s anthology benefitted from the avail- ability of scholarships to both university and fee-paying schools. That path to educational and social aspiration and its representation in poetry is dis- cussed in the next chapter.
Notes 1. For a discussion of the design structures of management and forms of production, see Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7. 2. Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3. Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago Il: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 4. Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003). 5. Lawrence Rainey, ‘The of Cultural Economy of Modernism’ in Ronald Bush, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33–69. 6. Michael H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 347
7. Carey, op. cit. 8. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 9. Peter Womack, ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen’, Critical Quarterly 55:3 (October 2013), 26–43. 10. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Alan Sinfield,Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989) revd edn (London: Continuum, 2004). 11. Adriano Tilgher, Work: What it has Meant to Men through the Ages, transl. D.C. Fisher (London: Harrap, 1931), p. 63, cited by Shiach, op. cit., p. 4. 12. The Newbolt Report: Teaching of English in England. Being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Enquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England (1921). 13. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977); rprnt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 170–171. 14. Anon, ‘A Dweller in Wipers’ Elegy to that Town’, Wipers Times I: 3 (16 March 1916), n.p. 15. Gilbert Frankau, ‘Urgent or Ordinary’, Wipers Times, op. cit., n.p. 16. Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer and Other Poems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915), p. 7. 17. Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 68–69. 18. Frantzen, op. cit., pp. 13–27. 19. Statement by Prime Minister 11 October 1916, Hansard, HC Deb 86 cc95–161 (103). 20. Asquith, op. cit., pp. 8–10. 21. Asquith, op. cit., pp. 11–12. 22. Edmund John, ‘In Memoriam’, in J.W. Cunliffe, ed., Poems of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 139. 23. Frank Taylor, ‘The English Dead’, Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 255–258. 24. The Rev Isaac Gregory Smith, ‘Close Your Ranks’, in Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 240–241. 25. Margaret L. Woods, ‘The First Battle of Ypres’, in Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 290–305 (295). 26. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Poet as Hero’ in Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 61. 27. Wilfred Owen, ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’ (corrected from ‘Apologia pro poema meo’) The War Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), pp. 18–19. 28. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 118. 29. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 119. 30. Vandiver notes that the poem was a verse letter to a teacher at Marlborough, John Bain, op. cit., p. 83. 348 S. BYRNE
31. Charles Hamilton Sorley, ‘XXIX’ in Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), pp. 73–78. 32. For example, Owen Seaman, ‘Pro Patria’, War-Time Verses (London: Constable, 1915), pp. 7–8. 33. As Vandiver notes, in ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Spring Offensive’, for exam- ple, op. cit., p. 394. Vandiver also cites a poem which references Owen’s use of the quotation from Horace. N.P. Graham, The Poems (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1921), quoted in Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 402–403. Wilfred Blair’s ‘A Ballad of Deathless Dons’ uses a single Greek word as part of its comic depiction of Oxford tutors drilling. Cunliffe, op. cit., p. 23. 34. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 170. 35. Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 25–26. 36. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 105. 37. Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 104–105. 38. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 106. 39. Vandiver, op. cit., p. 107. 40. T.S. Eliot, ‘Modern Education and the Classics’ in Selected Essays (1932) revd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 507–516 (513). 41. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Class and the Elite’, New Review XI: 6 (June 1945), 499–509. 42. Eliot, op. cit., p. 499. 43. Eliot, op. cit., p. 504. 44. Eliot, op. cit., p. 509. 45. Auden, however, refers to novel writing as a ‘higher art’ than poetry in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, though he qualifies this, making the comparator ‘the average poet’. He praises Isherwood’s work in ‘Birthday Poem’ and ‘The Novelist’. 46. Tony Harrison, The Gaze of the Gorgon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992). 47. Ivor Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems, ed P.J. Kavanagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.53. 48. See, for example, Diepeveen, op. cit., pp. 1–17; John Fordham, James Hanley, Modernism and the Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 78; Jason Harding, ‘Modernist Poetry and the Canon’ in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 225–243 (226). 49. Graves and Riding define and discuss what constitutes Modernist poetry and include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Siegfried Sassoon, and E. E. Cummings. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927), pp. 155–189. 50. Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 9. 51. Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 83. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 349
52. Riding and Graves, ibid. 53. Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 84. 54. transition (sic) 16–17 (June 1929), 1. 55. Carey, op. cit., pp. 16–17. 56. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 9. 57. Lawrence Rainey, ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism’ in Ronald Bush, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33–69 (33). 58. Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 117. 59. Rainey, op. cit., p 43. 60. Rainey, op. cit., p. 56. 61. Rainey, op. cit., p. 44. 62. Rainey, op. cit., p. 43. 63. Carey, op. cit., pp. 4–15. 64. D.H. Lawrence, ‘Humanity Needs Pruning’, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian Pinto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 677. 65. Lawrence, ‘Evil is Homeless’, op. cit., pp. 711–712. 66. Lawrence, ‘City-Life’, op. cit., p. 632. 67. Lawrence, ‘Cry of the Masses’, op. cit., pp. 584–585. 68. See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London, 1963) and Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (London, 1948). Also discussed by Fordham. 69. D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Education of the People’ in Works of D.H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85–166 (97). 70. Lawrence, ‘Embankment at Night, Before the War: Outcasts’, Poems, pp. 143–146. 71. George Watson and J.D. Chambers, among others, argue that in addition to the social standing of Lydia Lawrence, because Lawrence’s own father did not remain a miner but became a contractor, D.H. Lawrence should not be seen as of working-class origin. The arguments are discussed in Colin Holmes, ‘Lawrence’s Social Origins’ in Christopher Heywood, ed., D.H. Lawrence, New Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 1–15. 72. Lawrence, op. cit., pp. 490–491. 73. Lawrence, op. cit., pp. 430–431. 74. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 16–17. 75. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 74. 350 S. BYRNE
76. F.R. Leavis and Denys Thomson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), pp. 1–3. 77. Williams Culture and Society, p. 253. 78. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1833), I, pp. 80–81. 79. G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longman, Green 1942), p. 576. 80. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 582. 81. Michael H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 4. 82. Cleanth Brooks semi-humorously asserted that a knowledge of nineteenth-century poetry was a handicap for understanding twentieth- century works. Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939); rprnt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 1. 83. D.J. Enright, Introduction, Poets of the 1950’s: An Anthology of New English Verse (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1955), p. 2. 84. Douglas Jefferies, editorial, Storm I: 1 (February 1933), 2, quoted in James Smith, ‘The Radical Literary Magazine of the 1930s and British Government Surveillance: The Case of Storm Magazine,’ Literature and History 3rd Series IXX: 2 (September 2010), 69–86 (73). 85. D.E.S. Maxwell, Poets of the Thirties (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 17–18. 86. Enright, op. cit., p. 3. 87. See, for example, Stephen Spender’s reply to the accusation that writers dare not transgress a left-wing orthodoxy. Stephen Spender, ‘The Left- Wing Orthodoxy’, New Verse (Autumn 1938); Percy Wyndham Lewis, ‘Freedom that Destroys Itself’ The Listener (8 May 1935), quoted in Cunningham, op. cit., pp. 28–29. 88. Adrian Caesar, ‘Auden and the Class System’, in Tony Sharpe, ed., W.H. Auden in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 69–78 (70). 89. W.H. Auden, ‘XXIV’ [Birthday Poem], Poems 1931–1936, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 156–157 (157). 90. Letter quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 157. 91. Quoted in Davenport-Hines, op. cit., p. 179. 92. W.H. Auden, ‘The Cave of Making’, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1976), pp. 691–694 (692). 93. W.H. Auden, ‘IX’ [I have a Handsome Profile’], Poems 1931–1936, English Auden, pp. 123–124. 94. Caesar, op. cit., p. 71. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 351
95. Caesar, op. cit., p. 72. 96. Auden, ‘As We Like it’, The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 25–26. 97. Auden, ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, Collected Poems, pp. 310–312. 98. Caesar, op. cit., p. 76, Collected Poems, p. 693. 99. John Lucas, ‘Auden’s Politics: Power, Authority and the Individual’ in Stan Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 52–64 (153). 100. Auden, ‘VIII’ [‘Brothers who when the sirens roar’], Poems 1931–1936, English Auden, pp. 120–123. 101. Auden quoted in Dennis Davison, W.H. Auden (London: Evans, 1970), p. 29. 102. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, Last Poems (1936–1939), Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 368–370. 103. W.B. Yeats, ‘Introductory Rhymes’, Responsibilities (1914) op. cit., p. 113. 104. George Moore, Hail and Farewell 3 vols, III: Vale (New York: Appleton, 1914), p. 170. 105. Moore, op. cit., p. 171. 106. W.B. Yeats, ‘To a Wealthy Man who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were Proved the People Wanted Pictures’ Responsibilities, op. cit., pp. 119–120. 107. George Orwell and Desmond Hawkins in conversation, ‘The Writer in the Witness-Box’, BBC Radio Home Service, Broadcast 6 December 1940. A transcript is given on The George Orwell Foundation website. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/ essays-and-other-works/the-proletarian-writer/. 108. John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. ix. 109. Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant- Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 122. 110. Quoted in Sinfield,op. cit., p. 67. 111. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (London: Secker and Warburg, 1941), p. 408. 112. Raymond Williams, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). 113. Raymond Williams, ‘Working-class Culture’, Universities and Left Review I:2 (Summer 1957), 29–32. 114. Nicolson, 1939–1945, pp. 23–21, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 69. Sinfield’s note. 115. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), p. 165, quoted in Sinfield,op. cit., p. 69. 352 S. BYRNE
116. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 2007), p. 73, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 75. 117. Hutchison, p. 61, quoted in Sinfield,op. cit., p. 71. Sinfield’s note. 118. Hutchison, p. 63, quoted in Sinfield,op. cit., p. 74. Sinfield’s note. 119. Hutchinson, p. 60, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 75. Sinfield’s note. 120. Tom Nairn, English, p. 67 Sinfield, op. cit., p. 77. Sinfield’s note. 121. Le Grand, pp. 158. Sinfield’s note, op. cit., p. 128. 122. See, e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl. Walter Kauffman and R.J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 77. 123. Peter Womack, ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen’, Critical Quarterly 55:3 (October 2013), 26–43 (26). 124. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939–1945, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Collins, 1967), p. 186. Womack’s note. 125. P.B. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo; A Conversation, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), ll. pp. 544–546. Womack’s note. 126. Letter to Lady Violet Bonham Carter, quoted in Nicolson, Diaries, p. 314. Womack’s note. 127. Nicolson, op. cit., p. 117. Womack’s note. 128. Nicolson, op. cit., p. 432. 129. Nicolson, op. cit., p. 153, quoted in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (1988); rprnt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 18. 130. Peter Childs and John Horne, The Twentieth Century in Poetry (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998), p. 125. 131. Childs and Horne, ibid. 132. John Holloway, ‘New Lines in English Poetry’, The Hudson Review IX:4 (Winter 1957), 592–597 (592–593). Also see Martin Green, ‘British Decency’, The Kenyon Review XXI: 4 (Autumn, 1959), 505–532 (509); and Philip Oakes, ‘A New Style in Heroes’, Observer (1 January 1956), 8. 133. Donald Davie, letter to William Van O’Connor (31 December 1957) quoted by Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 58. 134. Anthony Hartley, ‘Poets of the Fifties,’ Spectator (27 August 1954), 260. 135. Poets represented in the first New Lines anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956). 136. Anon [J.D. Scott], ‘In the Movement’, Spectator 193: 6588 (1 October 1954), 399–400 (400). 137. Robert Conquest, Introduction, New Lines, p. xxi. 138. Holloway, op. cit., p. 592. 139. Conquest, op. cit., p. xv. 140. Kingsley Amis, ‘Something Nasty in the Bookshop’, Donald Davie, ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’ in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 46–47, p. 67. 7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TO THE 1960S 353
141. Donald Davie, ‘Cherry Ripe’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 67–68. 142. D.J. Enright, ‘The Interpreters’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 60–62. 143. Donald Davie, ‘Too Late For Satire’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 68–69. 144. John Holloway, ‘Epitaph for a Man’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 9–10. 145. Kingsley Amis, ‘My Kind of Comedy’, Twentieth Century (July 1961), 50; Philip Larkin, introduction to Jill; John Wain, ‘Engagement or Withdrawal? Some Notes on the Work of Philip Larkin’, Critical Quarterly VI (Summer 1964), 177 quoted in Morrison, op. cit., pp. 68–69. 146. Holloway, on Donald Davie’s Brides of Reason (Fantasy Press, 1959), op. cit., p. 593. 147. Kingsley Amis, ‘Nocturne’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 48–49 (49). 148. John Wain, ‘Who Speaks my Language III’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 86–87. 149. John Wain, ‘Who Speaks my Language IV’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 87–88. 150. D.J. Enright, ‘Class’, The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 64. 151. Morrison, op. cit., pp. 61–64. 152. Enright, op. cit., p. 9. 153. Enright, op. cit., p. 11. 154. Philip Larkin, statement preceding a selection of his poems in Enright, op. cit., pp. 77–78 (78). 155. A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962); revd edn (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 23. 156. Alvarez, op. cit., p. 25. 157. Ibid. 158. Alvarez, op. cit., p. 26. 159. R.S. Thomas, ‘A Peasant’ and ‘The Welsh Hill Country’ Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 77–78. 160. D.J. Enright, ‘The Poor Wake up Quickly’ and ‘The Noodle Vendor’s Flute’ in Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 85–86, pp. 886–887.
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Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977). New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; Reprint. Green, Martin, ‘British Decency’, The Kenyon Review XXI, no. 4 (Autumn, 1959), 505–532. Harding, Jason, ‘Modernist Poetry and the Canon’, in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 225–243. Harrison, Tony, The Gaze of the Gorgon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992. Hartley, Anthony, ‘Poets of the Fifties’, Spectator (27 August 1954), 260. Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Holloway, John, ‘New Lines in English Poetry’, The Hudson Review IX, no. 4 (Winter 1957), 592–597 (592–593). Holmes, Colin, ‘Lawrence’s Social Origins’, in D.H. Lawrence, New Studies, ed. Christopher Heywood, 1–15. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Jefferies, Douglas, editorial, Storm I, no. 1 (February 1933), 2, quoted in James Smith, ‘The Radical Literary Magazine of the 1930s and British Government Surveillance: The Case of Storm Magazine’, Literature and History 3rd Series IXX, no. 2 (September 2010), 69–86. Lawrence, D.H., ‘The Education of the People’, in Works of D.H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 85–166. ———, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Vivian Pinto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Leavis, F.R., and Denys Thomson, Culture and Environment. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933. Lucas, John, ‘Auden’s Politics: Power, Authority and the Individual’, in Stan Smith, ed, The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 52–64. Lukács, Georg, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London, 1963. Maxwell, D.E.S., Poets of the Thirties. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Moore, George, Hail and Farewell, 3 vols, III: Vale. New York: Appleton, 1914. Morrison, Blake, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Nicolson, Harold, Diaries and Letters 1939–1945, ed Nigel Nicolson. London: Collins, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kauffman and R.J. Hollingdale. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. Oakes, Philip, ‘A New Style in Heroes’, Observer (1 January 1956), 8. Orwell, George, and Desmond Hawkins, ‘In Conversation, “The Writer in the Witness-Box”’, BBC Radio Home Service, Broadcast 6 December 1940. The George Orwell Foundation Website. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/ 356 S. BYRNE
the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/ the-proletarian-writer/ ———, The Lion and the Unicorn. London: Secker and Warburg, 1941. Owen, Wilfred, ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’, The War Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994. Rainey, Lawrence, ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism’, in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 33–69. Riding, Laura, and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1927. Sassoon, Siegfried, The War Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Seaman, Owen, War-Time Verses. London: Constable, 1915. Shiach, Morag, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989), rev. edn London: Continuum, 2004. Sorley, Charles Hamilton, Marlborough and Other Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916. Statement by the Prime Minister 11 October 1916, Hansard, HC Deb 86 cc95–161. The Newbolt Report: Teaching of English in England. Being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Enquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England (1921). Tilgher, Adriano, Work: What It Has Meant to Men through the Ages, trans. D.C. Fisher. London: Harrap, 1931. transition (sic) 16–17 (June 1929), 1. Trevelyan, G.M., English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria. London: Longman, Green 1942. Vandiver, Elizabeth, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wain, John, ‘Engagement or Withdrawal? Some Notes on the Work of Philip Larkin’, Critical Quarterly VI (Summer 1964), 177. Whitworth, Michael H, Reading Modernist Poetry. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Williams, Raymond, ‘Working-class Culture’, Universities and Left Review I, no. 2 (Summer 1957), 29–32. ———, Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. ———, Politics of Modernism. London: Verso, 2007. ———, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso, 1980. Womack, Peter, ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen’, Critical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (October 2013), 26–43. Yeats, W.B., Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1963. CHAPTER 8
The Twentieth Century: After the 1960s
Introduction The history of poetry in English is inextricable from the histories of edu- cation, the literary magazine and the small independent press, and the social divisions which have been instrumental in the formation of the canon of poetry in English. This section looks at these in the context of poems published across a period in whose early years Alvarez declared English poetry to have been stuck in gentility1 and in whose middle period The Guardian declared poetry to be the new rock and roll;2 when centres and collectives invigorated poetry in the North of Britain and Northern Ireland, when little magazines flourished, and when the emer- gence of internet publishing and book sales caused a proliferation of online magazines, and the death of many print journals, as well as a dearth of independent bookshops; when National Poetry Day was launched (1994); when the New Generation Poets were heavily pro- moted; when Poems on the Underground was a bestseller;3 when poetry appeared in the news pages of newspapers, and later almost disappeared from them; and when Peter Forbes called poetry criticism more ‘com- promised’ even than reviews of fiction, and ‘incestuous’, and asserted that ‘there is now no consensus on what constitutes a poem or an effec- tive poetic technique’.4 The first part of this section summarises the his- tory of education reports and Acts from the 1930s, then considers the impact of the tripartite or dual state school systems (Secondary Technical, Secondary Modern and Grammar School, or Secondary Modern and
© The Author(s) 2020 357 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_8 358 S. BYRNE
Grammar School) on the work of some poets who are self-declared ben- eficiaries of, and/or sufferers from, the Act of 1944 (1945 in Scotland and 1947 in Northern Ireland). This entails a discussion of the represen- tation of the relationship between sons, fathers, father figures, and fore- bears, relationships which are bound up with issues of occupation, masculinity, and class and which, for the generation of poets whose fathers fought in the Great War or the Second World War, lead also to a discussion of the influence of war and of violence in their poems. Here, the section draws on the work of, for example, Neil Corcoran5 and Blake Morrison.6 The title of the first part of this section refers to the ‘scholarship boy’ not because there were no scholarship girls but because there are fewer poems by women on the subject of the transformative effect of the schol- arship or a subsidised place at a grammar school and because the promo- tion and reception of poetry by female recipients of the scholarship rarely refer to this, an interesting and possibly significant point in itself. Vivid descriptions of the experience of working-class girls in selective and largely middle-class schools exist, of course; an example provided is from autobio- graphical writing by Valerie Avery.7 This section touches on the represen- tation of mothers and the world of women as this relates to education and class, in particular the representation of that female world as an exclusion or refuge from the world of male work. This section also considers the importance of the literary magazine of the mid- to late twentieth century in promoting poets and poetry con- cerned with issues of class, and the work of independent and small pub- lishing houses, as well as the impact of the closure of some poetry lists. Some analyses are offered of a selection of representative poems from the period, focusing on texts which address or manifest issues of class and language and on the relationship between these issues and poetic forms. These build on the work of critics such as David Kennedy who see the poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century as, firstly, ‘events in an ongo- ing struggle to redefine the traditional canon of British [and Irish] poetry—traditional in the sense of being realist, lyric, social and largely novelistic—by subjecting it to maximum stress in order to admit previ- ously excluded voices, histories, classes and genders’; and secondly, ‘as explorations of the fictional and historical as modes of accommodation by which the outsider is able to gain access to an existing discourse or struc- ture and preserve his sense of history, language and place as inherited struggles’.8 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 359
Scholarship Boy: Education, Family, and Class The ‘scholarship boy’ phenomenon may not have produced more poets than would have existed without it. It would be arrogant on the part of those who received a secondary or tertiary education to assume that those who left school at 15 or earlier can’t write poetry, or read it, and we have enough examples to know that this is not the case. Access to further and higher education, to the example of canonical writers, to information and encouragement, and to the kinds of coteries that foster groups of writers, however, are privileges which, where talent exists, cannot but help. Altick’s figures for writers born in the period 1900–1935, identifying class by father’s occupation, show that 10% of the sample of authors identified by inclusion in his two chosen texts came from the upper classes (categorised as nobleman, baronet, knight, squire, and gentleman); 84.2% came from the middle classes (a wide category listed as including many occupations between merchant and bookkeeper); and 5.8% from the lower classes (cat- egorised as ‘labourers of all descriptions’).9 Altick’s information on educa- tion was more limited, but he was able to list that of 330 authors for this period and found that 7.2% had little or no schooling; 20.5% ended their education at secondary level; and 72.3% had a university education. He concludes that at a time when the middle classes were estimated to consti- tute a quarter of the population of Britain, the middle classes produced the majority of authors.
The chief reason is that the schooling available to children of the working classes (75% or more of the population) was so meagre and ineffectual that the odds against a working-class child’s becoming a writer, or for that matter the practitioner of any other art or humane discipline, were over-whelming. That this remained true long after the Forster Act of 1870 spread, and sub- sequent laws made compulsory, the benefits of elemental education is proved by the fact that only fourteen out of 240 writers of the period 1900–1935 had working-class origins; and the number would be even smaller if Irish writers were eliminated from the list.10
Altick argues that the effects of progress in British education made in years after 1935 were only just becoming evident in 1962 ‘in the increase of writers with proletarian backgrounds’. That progress, the ‘post-war reforms by which workers’ children are given a somewhat better chance for secondary and university education promise within a decade or two to substantially alter the class-distribution of writers’.11 Those reforms include 360 S. BYRNE the provisions of scholarships to grammar and other non-technical or vocational schools, scholarships which are acknowledged by their recipi- ents to have been profound in their effects, both positive and negative. Rehearsing the findings of Williams and Altick, Malcolm Bradbury acknowledges that ‘the main sources of serious literature have been the “solid” middle classes’ but that after 1945 the pattern has been modi- fied.12 Bradbury tends to focus on novelists as exemplifying the kind of writer who has become more common since then, though he does offer Dylan Thomas as a ‘recognisable type of the young, lower-middle-class provincial boy from the grammar-school plotting his way towards literary success’. This kind of writer, Bradbury says, tends to be bohemian and writing in regional communities such as Liverpool. For Bradbury, ‘the contemporary classlessness of education, the less defined stratifications of taste, and the depersonalization of publishing have all weakened some of the sentiments of class-consciousness that existed in literature in the 1950s’, a time when, he asserts, entry into writ- ing as a profession seemed selective and there was a feeling that culture was monopolised by particular classes.13 Writing some years after Altick, Bradbury can claim that the Dylan Thomas type of writer may have been novel once but is no longer. Whilst the 1944 Act is at least in part respon- sible for this, to Bradbury, ‘such an education is less expected of today’s [1971] writers, since the traditional benefits of an education—which once helped writers to relate themselves towards the classical past of literary practice—are less urgent needs in the present literary climate’. In 1971, culture is conceived as ‘a mode of personal expression, or the expression of a new and self-aware age-group’. Writers may have been to university or not, but are likely to ‘get more of their literary experience out of the gen- erational subcultures through which, with little class differentiation, they move’. Clearly, social origin and education are not the sole determining factors that enable anyone to become a published writer, and clearly writ- ers of working-class origins have published. Nonetheless, class remains a factor in the obtaining of education and the production of literature, and more than four decades after Bradbury published his work, writers are still writing about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the exclusion of some segments of society from the high. The educational reforms cited by Altick can be seen in the increase between 1913 and 1937 of fee-free places at grammar schools, from slightly less than a third to almost half. Nonetheless, many families could 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 361 not afford to take up those places because of the cost of uniforms, sports equipment, school trips, and other expenses. The 1936 Act had raised the leaving age to 15 other than for cases of ‘beneficial employment’, but this was not enforced.14 The report completed by William Spens in 1938 rec- ommended that a common code of regulation be applied to all secondary education in the country, a move supported by the Labour Party but ini- tially rejected (Brian Simon suggests rejected as ‘too visionary’15). Spens also recommended the institution of three streams of secondary educa- tion—grammar, secondary modern, and technical—which was mandated. In addition to these state schools, direct grant (as opposed to Local Education Authority-funded) schools were established. Before and during the Second World War, just as before and during the First World War, there were calls for educational reform and resistance. Fred Clarke, later head of the London Institute of Education, argued that the current edu- cational system in England was detrimental to social unity and would lead to social conflict.
We can hardly continue to contemplate an England where the mass of the people coming on by one educational path are to be governed for the most part by a minority advancing along a quite separate and more favoured path [….] There is no honest defence, no democratic defence, indeed, no genu- ine aristocratic defence [for the current system].16
The reference to the aristocratic motivation is apt, given the Tory pater- nalist background of the subsequent Act of 1944 (1945 in Scotland and 1947 in Northern Ireland). Calls for educational reform were not all based on a desire to democra- tise the existing system or to allow children of less well-off families access to superlative fee-paying schools. A number of publications of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly, as Simon points out, in the Spring of 1940, when the war seemed to be going against the Allies, refer to the inadequacies and failings of the public schools. Simon quotes from a letter written by the Head of Harrow School to the Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education in October 1938:
Headmasters are literally spending half their time in commercial travelling and touting on preparatory school doorsteps. All sorts of intriguing, illegal commission paying and competitive reduction of fees are taking place. Standards are declining and disaster threatens unless something is done.17 362 S. BYRNE
Two years later, T.C. Worsley, a Cambridge-educated private school teacher, asks, if the public schools are to be regarded as national assets for their ‘leadership training qualities’, then ‘what are we to think of those qualities when we survey the mess into which their leadership has brought us?’18 E.C. Mack, a year further into the war, finds that the upper classes and public schools failed in both 1919 and 1939. In 1919, when the world was crying out for a new order, they, ‘clinging to a tradition which socialist-liberalism tried futilely to undermine, not only failed to provide the leaders necessary to make that new order, but stood squarely in the way of its realisation’. In 1939, the upper classes and public schools failed to ready Britain for the next war. Mack has the impression of ‘disastrous bungling, inefficiency and lack of vision in high places’ for which the pub- lic schools ‘can hardly be freed from blame’. Having failed to create a bet- ter world, he writes, the upper classes and public schools ‘seem to have lost the power or the will to save this one’.19 The Church is also found inade- quate in Simon’s overview of education during this period, having ‘failed to cope at all effectively with their schools’ or to reorganise more than 16% of churchschools as required by government policy.20 The proposal that emerged from this dissatisfaction was radical. It is summarised by Simon as follows:
1. Abolition (or at least effective assimilation) of the public schools as a step towards the creation of a single national system of education 2. Abolition of the dual system. All schools under public control 3. Raising of the school leaving age to 16 4. Secondary education for all over 11. Abolition of fees in all second- ary schools. A common code of regulation for all secondary schools. (Or, in a more advanced form, the establishment of the single, com- mon, or multilateral secondary school)21
Simon charts the ways in which radical proposals for educational reform were sidelined or evaded during the progress of various advisory bodies during the early 1940s.22 The changes actually implemented were consid- erably less radical. ‘The public schools survived inviolate’, no national system was achieved, and the leaving age was made 15. The common code brought in was divided and fragmented, and the 11-plus examination became more competitive than ever. Neither equality of conditions nor equality of status and esteem between secondary schools was achieved. Simon concludes that the envisaged new order in English education turned out to be the old order in a new guise.23 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 363
Two issues, the poorly maintained buildings and low standards of church schools, and the possible integration of private schools into the state system, were not fully realised by Butler’s Act of 1944. Some church schools took funding in return for a significant proportion of local author- ity representatives on governing bodies, but private schools remained pri- vate. The extent to which the Act and its implementation were less than successful may be measured by the declining enthusiasm and effectiveness of the first post-war Minister for Education, Ellen Wilkinson. Wilkinson, who had attained a university education from a working-class background, initially envisioned ‘laughter in the classroom, self-confidence growing every day, eager interest instead of bored uniformity’, and fought for free school meals and a minimum leaving age of 16. Ms Wilkinson died of an overdose in February 1947.24 The scholarship system that gave working-class children the opportu- nity to study beyond the age of 14, and to take up places at fee-paying grammar schools (if their parents could find the money for uniforms, sports equipment, and other necessities), also produced the phenomenon of the scholarship boy. This character is often represented as at best an amphibian and bilingual being and at worst a displaced one. Working-class schoolchildren sent to posh schools, uprooted from familial and social networks, could be assimilated into middle-class culture or be at home in neither, though often an observer of both. Some remarks made by head teachers in the 1950s, and quoted by Ken Worpole, suggest that the working-class grammar-school child was considered less able and treated less well than the middle-class or fee-paying pupil. Grammar schools are said to be essential for ‘those who can learn from books’.
‘Those who learn by doing are not really for the grammar school, though they are in fact here and we ought to do our best for them.’ Another head teacher said: ‘I see grammar school education very strongly as a matter of communi- cating middle-class values to a “new” population.’ Another asserted: ‘It is con- cerned with manners … and the creation of style: the public school virtues, in fact—though without snobbery.’ And yet another described the role of the grammar school as ‘a preparation of that part of society which should have opinions’.25
Worpole notes that one teacher was explicit: The grammar school now includes among its pupils a much higher proportion of children from poorer homes … Children like these have very little to give to the social or cultural life of the school. He cites other head teachers’ stated reasons 364 S. BYRNE for why many intelligent working-class pupils did not achieve aca- demic success:
‘character weaknesses’ or ‘defective character qualities’. He adds that, for many working-class children, the grammar school was ‘a form of Inquisition; they could either recant and embrace a new faith—or be broken on the wheel.
A more positive account of social engineering through education, the later comprehensive system, is given by Frances Stevens in The New Inheritors, whose title page continues: ‘some questions about the education of intel- ligent “first-generation” children’. Stevens defines these inheritors as ‘intelligent children whose parents did not receive an extended educa- tion’.26 The ‘problem’ described by Stevens in her first chapter is the ‘pre- dicament in which we find ourselves if we persistently interpret education in class terms’, in that grammar schools may ‘cause tension between a child and his home […] sometimes the result of an insistence on false refinements of speech and behaviour’.27 The phrase ‘false refinement’ is uninterrogated by Stevens and the acknowledgement of the possibility of a problem in the enforcement of RP and Standard English is somewhat negated by the earlier statement:
[i]f teachers encourage the working-man’s child to talk posh they are creat- ing a cleavage between him and his family; if they let him go on dropping his aitches and mixing up his cases they are depriving him of his chances and perhaps even deliberately trying to perpetuate class distinction.28
The assumption is that ‘working-man’s’ grammar is wrong. Stevens quotes from a head teacher whose point is worth bearing in mind during any reading of memoirs about class distinctions in grammar or other private schools: the comprehensive school ‘doesn’t abolish social conflicts—it internalises them’.29 For Richard Hoggart, the scholarship boy loses intellectual curiosity and joy in learning, developing a powerful and methodical work ethic which produces a clinical form of knowledge not founded in a deep regard for the subject or its role in life.30 ‘The Scholarship Boy’ section of The Uses of Literacy can now seem patronising, homogenising, and stereotyp- ing of working-class culture: ‘“E’s got brains,” or “E’s bright,” he hears constantly.’31 ‘On the other side Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 365 someone is singing a snatch of song or Father says intermittently whatever comes into his head.’32 Hoggart writes of the scholarship boy that:
he both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of his own and their situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother. And this is only one of his temptations to self-dramatization.
If scholarship boys lose one culture but do not fully integrate into another, as Hoggart suggests, they resemble the group with ‘no social cohesion, no social continuity’ described by Eliot,33 whose theory, like Hoggart’s, sug- gests that the working classes cannot adapt or embrace the cultural prod- ucts originating in other classes. The anxieties and dislocations attributed to the scholarship boy appear in the poetry of Tony Harrison (b.1937), but that poetry also argues that working-class culture has value and can incorporate, or assimilate, products of other cultures. Harrison’s now canonical and much anthologised paired sonnets ‘Them & [uz] I and II’ (1978, THCP, pp. 133–134) have become the anthem of the working- class pupil who defiantly rejects assimilation, and Harrison has become the archetype of the scholarship boy, often named as such in articles such as Ken’s Worpole’s for the New Left Review.34 The poems are dedicated to ‘Professors Richard Hoggart and Leon Cortez’, the latter the stage name of a Cockney music hall comedian, singer, and actor. Among other turns, Leon Cortez (real name Richard A. Chalkin) presented Shakespearean soliloquys in a Cockney dialect. The labelling of him as Professor asserts that his feats of memory and linguistic dexterity make him equal to the much-respected academic. For Worpole,
if Hoggart was the benign chronicler of the ‘scholarship boy’, Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden the sociologists, Raymond Williams the novelist, then Tony Harrison is pre-eminently the poet of that major cultural (and disinte- grative) experience.
Poems such as ‘Me Tarzan’ dramatise the division between the scholarship boy who must stay in to finish his Latin prose and boys who can spend the evening ‘laikin’’, ‘tartin’’, and at ‘t’flicks’ The( School of Eloquence, p. 126). The scholarship boy still speaks like they do: ‘Ah bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose’, but like Tarzan the Ape boy who has to learn to be the Earl of Greystoke, he is inhabiting different worlds, of the writers of the first 366 S. BYRNE century AD, and of the rigours of a Classical education. The image of the boy’s ‘bodiless head’ poking out of the skylight suggests both the decapi- tation of Cicero by Mark Anthony’s troops and a Classical bust, so that he models both imperialist pride and the death of a former self, whilst the expression ‘like patriarchal Cissy-bleeding-ro’s’ anticipates the other boys’ likely insult, articulated much later in his life by the Cracker neighbour in ‘The Lords of Life’ (1984, THCP, pp. 243–247). The family life described in Harrison’s work enacts the divisiveness of education. Worpole admires Harrison’s sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence but argues that Harrison has been partially blind to working- class culture outside the warm family circle, so that some of the sonnets and longer poems such as v. (1985, THCP, pp. 263–279) reduce it to clumsy workmen and spray-painting football fans.35 The family circle rep- resented is not always warm, but it may be fair to say that though sympa- thy is shown for working-class men and women, particularly those of the past, the portraits are reductive. ‘On Not Being Milton’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 122) and ‘The Rhubarbarians’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 123–124) sympathetically portray Luddite frame-breakers and strikers, and ‘Working’ painfully brings to light Patience Kershaw, a 14-year-old mine worker (The School of Eloquence, p. 135). The narrator of v. tries hard to understand the problems of unemployment, the poverty trap, and inner-city blight, until his skin-self’s provocation makes him lose his tem- per and swear back (p. 271). Similarly, in plays such as The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990, P5) and The Labourers of Herakles (1995, P3, pp. 115–152), working-class men are shown as oppressed and dispos- sessed and remain victims until they react with violence. The metamor- phoses in the plays of mostly male characters—satyrs to hooligans in Trackers; builders to Herakles/Athenian Guards/Women of Miletos in Herakles; teachers (one of whom was played by a woman in the BBC2 broadcast of the play) to Herods in The Big H (1984, TW, pp. 321–361), like the simile in ‘Me Tarzan’ and the division of poet/skinhead in v., may suggest the sense of living in two worlds, perhaps never fully in either. Bradbury finds the term ‘alienation’ to be ‘so over-used, in political, psychological and religious connotations, as to be almost beyond defini- tion’, but suggests that we may use it to denote an artist who
aims to give a disinterested overview of society in order to maintain that kind of spirit and value that belongs to the inheritance of liberal art; or […] to an absolute and thorough-going nihilism in artists for whom plight, deg- radation and despair are a modus vivendi.36 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 367
He argues that there is a tendency to equate neurosis or social dislocation
with the fortunate disability. Edmund Wilson in his title-essay in The Wound and the Bow, cites the classical story of Philoctetes as a myth of the artist: isolated by his wound, he is redeemed by his skill with a bow—the power of artistic creativity.37
This could be a warning against the romanticising of the educated working-class writer’s dislocation and concomitant unhappiness, the ten- dency to see this as a necessary step towards his or her writing or indeed as the inevitable foundation of his or her subject matter. For Bradbury, the ‘growing “proletarianization” of the writer’ comes from the idea that art ‘can be produced only under conditions not just of independence but extreme deviance or criminality. The artist is the down-and-out, the per- petual proletarian’.38 Bradbury finds in modern art two different motives, the desire to be for art and the desire to be against prevalent society, lead- ing to assault and the urge to destroy. He asserts, however, that this is as much an expression of liberal society as it is a protest.39 Modern writers’ sense of themselves as outsiders is not necessarily because they are in ‘hos- tile detestation of liberal culture’; rather, they may see themselves as the continuation of it into unpropitious circumstances.40 For Bradbury, at the time of writing, the ‘liberal-critical function has held its place against the claims either of a more outright nihilism or outright politicism; and it is still very much alive’ in the work of authors such as Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, and John Osborne. The ‘marks of alienation’ in English writing, he asserts, are not those of ‘a retreat into the “unreality” of neurosis’, nor ‘the “over-reality” of a revolutionary politics’, but ‘an expression of the possibilities of artistic independence and a desire to use it to reach towards metaphors of a desirable wholeness’. The cultural cri- tique of many modern writers has been a protest against standardisation: ‘while they have resisted many features of the modern world, they have resisted it in the spirit of an aristocratic rejection of its overall cultural processes’.41 Bradbury’s account predicts the desire expressed in Harrison’s poems for unity over opposition and division, and the representation in Ted Hughes’s work of dismemberment and reassembly as well as the predica- tion of the crown as a unifying force. It doesn’t, however, predict the post-humanist, post-essentialist art of later writers, and the extent to which his view of society as increasingly egalitarian and proletarian would be 368 S. BYRNE contested, particularly in reference to the underclass of unemployment. He observes that ‘for culture to be more than the personal attribute of those artists who speak for it’, and art to have ‘public meaning beyond that of accepting anything by an accredited artist as art, then those things must exist within a stable sector of society in whom particular cultural values are embedded’.42 That sector, he argues, has been for 200 years the middle class. He attributes to the development of an egalitarian society not the restoration of cultural community but ‘the proletarianization of the entire culture’. Bradbury maps the economic and social changes that for him have ‘diminished the cultural confidence and influence of those classes [….] theatres closed, literary magazines could no longer afford ris- ing printers’ bills […] mass culture rushed in to take their places’. In such an egalitarian environment, both commitment to an idea of free creativity and the idea of alienation diminish. The writer is less alienated from the culture but at the same time less capable of making a commitment to the claims of art ‘either as an essential mode of social intelligence or as a com- mitment to an absolute formalism’.43 Bradbury’s post-war Britain is very different from that envisaged by Harrison. Bradbury sees ‘the relative decline of imaginative written litera- ture […] the disappearance of the social conditions that made literary elitism an effective possibility […] the fading of a clearly defined and selec- tive notion of “high” culture’. Harrison’s work would argue that distinc- tions between high and low culture were thriving well into the 1980s, though he, like other authors of the later twentieth century who have professed to demystify and make accessible the products of ‘high’ culture, might agree with Bradbury’s pronouncement that as the written work ‘loses some of its numinous power and eternity’ and ‘an appeal to tran- scendence or posterity yields to an environment of immediate consump- tion’, so the writer ‘tends to become historicist […] consciously conditioned by [the immediate environment] in the particular task’ professed.44 Peter Childs chooses Douglas Dunn (b.1942) as an exemplar of the working-class post-war poet. He finds in Dunn’s first collection,Terry Street (1969), Larkin-like qualities of detachment and light irony as well as the use of metonyms rather than metaphors, but finds that the poems mark a ‘sharp move away from the values of Larkin’s era’.45 Though they have an ‘air of class voyeurism (quite explicitly, in a line such as ‘Old women are seen wiping in doorless toilets’, ‘Ins and Outs’)’, the Terry Street poems are marked ‘by both a warmth towards their subject and a 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 369 deep indignation at the continuation of social inequalities, not at the exis- tence of the welfare state but at its failure’. Childs attributes this difference in part to the difference between Larkin’s lower-middle-class Midlands ‘alienation’ and Dunn’s Scots working-class childhood ‘rootedness’, but argues that
with respect to alienation and class, Dunn has had problems of a new kind. In terms of the postwar social revolution, he represents the fulfilment of the 1944 Butler Education Act [more accurately, the Education (Scotland) Act of 1945]—instead of upper-middle-class poets such as Auden ‘going over’ to the working class, in the late 1960s the inner-city schoolchildren, like Dunn, Tony Harrison, and later Craig Raine, were breaking out of their parents’ ‘slums’ to become poets.
This highlights the tendency in reviews of poems about working-class people by poets who themselves are declared working-class to homogenise working-class culture as well as to produce biographical readings. Dunn indeed describes his generation as beneficiaries of the Act,
which made it possible for us to stay on at school after the age of 14; before that it was impossible, unless your parents had the money; or unless a boy or a girl was tremendously gifted, identified as such, and given a scholarship to go on to a Grammar School, it didn’t happen for them.46
His parental home, however, was not in an inner-city slum but the village of Inchinnan, a semi-rural area on the opposite bank of the Clyde to the ship-building yards. He was educated at Renfrew High School and Camphill Senior Secondary School in Paisley, the latter less prestigious academically than Paisley Grammar but selective. Uninterested in science and maths, he failed those subjects, was initially debarred from university, and instead worked for local libraries before studying at the Scottish School of Librarianship. For Childs, entry to grammar school or post-14 secondary education ‘threw up different considerations of class distinction as children were exposed to a culture which was foreign if not antagonistic to that of their parents [and gave] a different language and voice to a disenfranchised sec- tion of British society’. Thus, by the end of the next decade, Dunn’s senti- ments about Terry Street had hardened into the angry class politics of his important fourth collection, Barbarians (1979).47 ‘Gardeners: England, 370 S. BYRNE
Loamshire, 1789 A gardener speaks, in the grounds of a great house, to his Lordship’48 speaks in the voice of those, gardeners, masons, printers, whose labour makes objects of aesthetic value attributed to others. Whereas the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs syndrome was sometimes applied to ‘labouring class poets’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, Dunn has been accused both of positive discrimination on the basis of class and of success through nepotism. A sneering round-up review of studies of twentieth-century poetry written by James Keery asserts that Dunn ‘sucked up to Larkin’ and that Larkin’s ‘astute manip- ulation got him [Dunn] published by Faber’.49 Of a group photograph in which both poets appear, Keery adds that the ‘“narrow gate” to the big time is just out of the picture, but I bet the previous snap on the roll shows Dunn sneaking gleefully through it’. Leaving aside the question of the literary value of the poems singled out in the review, this suggestion that Dunn needed a more successful patron in order to achieve publica- tion by a mainstream, prestigious, metropolitan company such as Faber, and could in some sense could ‘sneak’ into ‘the big time’ belies the more measured evaluations of his work, as well as the awards it has won, and transfers critique of the work to critique of and personal insult to the poet. It also suggests that Larkin’s letters to Charles Monteith and Brian Cox are different from, for example, the encouragement of Muldoon by Heaney or the assistance given to Eliot by Pound. Whether Larkin was a poor judge of poetry or would have promoted work that he didn’t con- sider worthwhile is not discussed. Dunn’s poems’ representation of divi- sion and exclusion is, of course, bound up with his representation of areas of Scotland and what it means to feel Scottish rather than or as well as British. Though a number of Harrison’s and Dunn’s poems seem to illustrate Hoggart’s thesis of the ‘Uprooted and Anxious’,50 and to perform a simul- taneous resistance to and making use of the assimilation of high culture, the writing of other scholarship boys shows that the process of alienation was not universal. By no means all those who gained a free or subsidised place at public or grammar schools become Angry Young Men, and some younger poets attest that education did not divide them from their origins.
We might say that rather than wishing to be the poet his father reads, [Simon] Armitage gets on with the job of being that poet. Another younger poet, W.N. Herbert, goes so far as to cast doubts on the continuing, wider relevance of the whole project of ‘the middle generation’.51 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 371
I remember once in the Poetry Workshop […] there were several poets who were strongly interested in this, with Tony Harrison, for example, with the whole sort of angst of becoming middle class through education. I never felt any angst about it! I never felt there was any sundering whatsoever.52
A scholarship boy who has other things in common with Harrison is Ted Hughes (1930–1998). Also from Yorkshire, though not Leeds,53 Hughes was seven years older than Harrison and therefore an early recipient of the scholarship system. Both poets emphasise their northern origins, and both have been enabled to reflect on Britain by time spent in the USA. Both have travelled in Europe and been influenced by archaic and Classical Greece, but Harrison’s Greek and Classical affiliations seem stronger than those of Hughes, who is more deeply rooted in the English rural land- scape (discussed below). Jonathan Bate states that Mexborough Grammar was ‘the intellectual making’ of Ted Hughes, partly in the encouragement given to him as a writer.54 A letter from Ted Hughes to John Fisher, one of Hughes’s English masters at Mexborough Grammar School, and cited by Bate as an inspiration to the future poet,55 states that Hughes felt there was an axe to be buried and that he continued to feel a difficulty about his relationship with the school as late as the summer of 1960.56 Nonetheless, Fisher and Hughes’s first form mistress and Head Teacher, Miss McLeod, and English teacher Pauline Mayne, were among the first to take an interest in Hughes’s writing.57 Hughes writes that he was so in love with both that either could teach him anything. Neither his published poems nor Steve Ely’s account of Hughes’s time at the school suggest that the scholarship to Mexborough Grammar pro- duced cultural kidnap or class conflict, and Ely suggests that Hughes tended to depict himself as ‘artist-as-reluctant-scholar’, presenting always a negative portrayal of the effect on him of formal teaching.58 Part of a group of five schools serving predominantly working-class areas, Mexborough Grammar was ‘committed to providing high-quality educa- tion to the brightest children in their catchments irrespective of their social backgrounds and, to some extent, the ability of their parents to afford fees’.59 Hughes was awarded a minor scholarship to attend the school, though his family by then had become more prosperous through the shop they had bought in Mexborough. Ely places the family among the middle classes of the town and recounts an anecdote of Ted Hughes sitting on the counter swinging his legs and reading comics whilst a poorer schoolmate, 372 S. BYRNE
Barry Hirst, was weighed down with the satchels of two paper rounds.60 Whilst the Hirst family needed their son’s help with the family finances, the Hughes family at this stage was able to allow theirs to work for pocket money, at weekends and holidays. Hughes’s youthful attitude to (urban) working-class children can be seen in a letter to Aurelia and Warren Plath from December 1956, when Hughes was teaching in Cambridge. He writes of children bright, clever, and enquiring at 11 by the age of 14 taking over what he alleges are working-class mental habits so that they become dull cloddishness and stupid as brutes.61 Hughes slightly modified this later, acknowledging that some of the boys had good hearts but stating that the older ones abandon good nature in their race to become slouching and gum-chewing shirk- ers.62 In a letter which laments the poverty of twentieth-century English literature, Hughes deplores the 1944 Education Act’s ‘debouchement of the masses’ to ‘Pop’ which, for Bentley, indicates Hughes’s ‘sense of soli- darity with what is conceived of as a general, epoch-changing class assault on, and takeover of, “culture”’.63 Other parts of Hughes’s childhood and background are perhaps more important influences on his work than the scholarship and early education he received. In particular, his relationship with his brother, Gerald Hughes, and their shared outdoor life offer better ways of reading class in his poetry, though another formative experience, his time at Cambridge, might not have been possible without Mexborough Grammar. Hughes’s experiences of school and university seem to have been almost the antithesis of those of Harrison. He reports no disparagement of his accent or dialect at Mexborough Grammar, which nurtured him as a writer, but Cambridge in his time, as reported by Bate, was divided on class as well as other lines,64 and he found the subject he initially chose to read, English Literature, antithetical to his poetic development. Though both poets were enabled by their respective school careers to become undergraduates, in contrast to Hughes, Harrison writes angrily of the attitude of Leeds Grammar School to his Leeds accent and dialect, yet found in Classics a lifelong love that informs and shapes his poetry. For Craig Raine (b.1944), gaining a scholarship to Barnard Castle School led to a transformative experience of the mind but not a catastrophic social metamorphosis. In an interview published in the Independent in 1994, Raine said that he felt lucky to have had the upbringing that he did and that he felt loved.65 Mrs Raine, whom he describes as a Lawrentian mother,66 was ambitious and so saw the worth of the opportunity afforded 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 373 by his major scholarship. He reports that, good at work and sport, he was happy at school and jokes that he regrets that he didn’t cry himself to sleep. Going to boarding school, however, opened up a silence and social gap between him and his parents, and education twice changed the way that Raine spoke, once at Barnard Castle and once Oxford. Raine acknowledges the importance of a school master, Arnold Snodgrass, who had been a friend of W.H. Auden at Oxford, to his intellectual development. In an interview for The Northern Echo, he describes Snodgrass as altering his pupil’s mind-set and making him a highly critical reader.67 Whilst at Barnard Castle, Raine gained the confidence to send some of his poems to Philip Toynbee, then lead reviewer of the Observer,68 a confidence presumably attributable at least in part to encouragement received there.
To write about Irish social class is even more difficult than to write about social class in Britain, but class differences are certainly perceived as existing in Ireland in the twenty-first century, and despite a number of moves to increase fee-free access to secondary schools in the 1960s,69 edu- cation is perceived as divided on class lines. The provision of free second- ary education has been perceived less as a widening of participation among working-class children than as ‘a windfall for middle-class families’.70 Newspaper and opinion pieces identify income- and education-based priv- ileged groups,71 and government and NGO publications use the term ‘class’ freely. For example, the Economic and Social Research Institute report Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions distinguishes between middle- and working-class schools and reports that Irish students ‘from working-class backgrounds’ were
less likely than their middle-class peers to go on to higher education, a pat- tern that was largely related to their lower levels of Leaving Certificate per- formance. The findings show that school context and experiences made a significant difference to the pathways pursued upon leaving school and were particularly significant in influencing whether young people progressed to some form of post-school education and training and in the nature of educa- tion pursued. Young people who attended socially mixed schools and, even more strikingly, middle-class schools were more likely than those from working-class schools to go on to some form of post-school education and training.72
Breen and Whelan refer to an argument put forward in 1993 that ‘what emerged in the Irish case was a pattern of maximally maintained inequal- ity’, that is, that ‘inequalities between classes remain the same from cohort 374 S. BYRNE to cohort unless they are forced to change by increasing enrolments’. Increased access to secondary education without any change in the selec- tion procedure mean that the ‘quality of outcomes increased not because merit replaced class in the selection of who got ahead but because selec- tion itself diminished’.73 Whilst an Irish grammar school or private education might offer greater possibility of upward social mobility and likelihood of future publication, this is in many cases complicated by being an education centred on reli- gion, which can offer common ground with the scholarship boy or girl’s home life. The alienation from family or class group described by Hoggart may be mitigated by the sense of immersion in a nomos, the beliefs and practices of a church, and even refutation of faith can produce, alongside alienation from the nomos, a strong sense of belonging to another, another ‘them’ versus ‘[uz]’. The poetry of Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) touches on many ways of identifying with groups, whether family, nation, or other, and of feeling separated from them. Heaney’s formative education took place as much among English and American comic books as at school,74 and perhaps more so in the oral culture of South Derry. On the way to Anahorish School, he learned schoolboy ‘roadside rhymes’, sectarian chants, and other unwritten verse.75 At school, he learned canonical works by rote, and as an adult he writes that he is ‘amazed’ to realise how much Byron and Keats he was able to recite at the age of 11. He goes on to say that though he knew Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’, the only line that was luminous for him was ‘To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees’, because of its association with his uncle’s orchard.76 ‘Literary language, the civilised utterance from the canon of English poetry’, was force-fed rather than internalised as a native language. It did not ‘re-echo our own speech in formal and surprising arrangements’, so poetry lessons resembled catechism lessons: ‘official inculcations of hallowed formulae’.77 Though in this sense alien, like the catechism, English canonical poetry introduced Heaney to the ‘gorgeous- ness of the polysyllable’, the dimensions of sound. A third kind of poetry, recited at children’s parties or to visiting relations, rhymed narratives such as ‘The Ballad of Michael Dwyer’ and ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’, ‘gave verse, however humble, a place in the life of the home, made it one of the ordinary rituals of life’.78 This stock of memory may have sustained Heaney at St Columb’s, where, he is shocked to remember, the only permitted books were those on the syllabi or in the sparsely stocked college library.79 When an aunt kindly offered to buy him a couple of books, he requested 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 375
T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935, which, arriving in a food parcel from home, had ‘an air of contraband’ but for years represented to Heaney only his ‘distance from the mystery’ and ‘unfittedness’. The teaching at St Columb’s, he reports, was not conducive to knowing ‘the double-edged nature of poetic reality’ or to appreciating in lines from ‘The Hollow Men’ the ‘pitch of their music, their nerves-end tremulousness, their treble in the helix of the ear’.80 ‘The Ministry of Fear’ illustrates that language was divided along class lines in schools of Northern Ireland in the 1950s, as Heaney asks Seamus Deane to remember ‘stuff’ such as the teacher’s assertion that Catholic pupils don’t speak as well as those from Protestant schools. Lines such as these from the same poem could be Heaney’s ‘Them & [uz]’:
Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Were walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution. (‘The Ministry of Fear’, ‘Singing School’, North, 1975, OG, p. 134)
The dislocating and divisive scholarship that sent some children to fee- paying schools could in more recent decades, as the percentage of school- leavers entering tertiary education has increased, be less important in the development of a poet than the opportunity to study at degree level. Harrison’s time studying Classics at Leeds, Hughes’s time reading English, and later Archaeology and Anthropology, at Cambridge, Heaney’s time at Queen’s University Belfast, and Douglas Dunn’s time at Hull, though not always and entirely positive experiences, were formative. The early scholar- ship boy generations read subjects other than Creative Writing at univer- sity but could and did receive encouragement from established poets as well as from each other and in particular had opportunities to publish and receive feedback from little magazines, many of which were student- founded. (The importance of these is discussed in a later section of the study.) Similarly, younger poets such as Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian (b.1950), and Ciaran Carson (b.1948) benefitted from the teaching or encouragement of established poets such as Heaney who held positions and ran writing groups at Queen’s, Belfast or Harvard, whilst subsequent generations who were enrolled in Creative Writing courses were able to devote more of their time to poetry and to benefit from the teaching and encouragement of poets such as McGuckian at Queen’s Belfast, Muldoon at Princeton, or Don Paterson at St Andrews. It may be significant that the 376 S. BYRNE online biographies of many female poets skip primary or secondary educa- tion to lead with the poet’s tertiary credentials, whilst others move straight from place of birth to the first publication or award.
Masculinity and Violence Ex-scholarship boy poets, Hoggart reports, describe an estrangement from the working-class father and the model of masculinity that he repre- sents.81 This, as David Kennedy writes, ‘evokes the hysterical stereotype which suggests that too much bookishness too early will prevent a boy from becoming a real man’.82 Edna Longley’s statement that it is through parents ‘that the individual locates himself or herself in history’ might be extended to suggest that it is through parents that the poet locates his or her origins, identity, and therefore class, whether through affiliation or resistance,83 but this does not mean that father or mother figures should always be read as biological antecedents, nor that the relationship between the poetic ‘I’ and those figures will be one of Oedipus or acolyte. Nor is a revisited relationship with the father the prerogative of the scholarship boy. Tom Leonard (b.1944) attended a local Catholic primary school in Pollock and Lourdes Comprehensive School. In ‘Fathers and Sons’ he recalls being embarrassed by his father’s whispering the words as he read the newspaper, but tacitly expresses regret and his present identification with Mr Leonard Snr, as, following a question from the audience: ‘Don’t you find/the use of phonetic urban dialect/rather restrictive?’, he goes home to his own children.84 A Guardian profile quotes Craig Raine as saying that at school he ini- tially said that his father was a football manager, eventually he brought friends home and they found Mr Norman Raine as wonderful as he did. Estrangement certainly appears in some representations of the child/ father relationship, but even in these the adult relationship is often shown as more complicated, anxious, ambivalent, and unresolved than portrayed by Hoggart. Raine’s prose piece, ‘A Silver Plate’ (CRR, pp. 43–64), touches on the relationship between scholarship boy son and spiritualist ex-boxer father, but the poem ‘Hungry Fighter’ is devoted to description of Mr Raine during a fight, bringing in the narrative ‘I’ only towards the end. That ‘I’ inherits relics of his father: a vest embroidered with a rose; a boxing licence; a silver-plated cup; but there is no more meditation on or retrospective anguish about the relationship than the image of the poet gazing on those mementos ‘longer than someone in love’ (CRR, p. 94). 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 377
Blake Morrison finds that in the work of male poets writing in the post- war period parents have an ‘unusual centrality’ and fathers figure more largely than mothers.85 Whilst warning against the potential for distortion in ‘parentobiographical’ approaches to writing, Morrison examines father- son relationships as key to the central ‘problem’ of several poets’ work.86 That relationship is not represented as in earlier times as oedipal and rebel- lious but as a more complex mesh of honouring, restitution, respect, and sense of failure, but also, more negatively, guilt, anger, and resentment. Morrison argues that whereas those growing up after the First World War saw an older generation responsible for the deaths of a younger, the chil- dren of the Second World War were expected to feel gratitude for the sacrifice of the older generation. That expectation might engender a sense of obligation or resistance and resentment. Measuring up to the genera- tion of men who fought might produce feelings of inadequacy and unman- liness in the post-war generation; their fathers and uncles were men ‘less shackled’ by domesticity [at least ostensibly] than the later post-feminist generation, and their lives could make the ‘“dawdling” peace-time’ youth of their sons seem uneventful.87 Neil Corcoran similarly argues that male ‘embourgeoised’ poets exhibit a ‘crisis of masculinity’ as they come to terms with ‘estrangement from their working-class fathers’.88 These may not go as far as Hoggart’s description of the scholarship boy left out of after-school street games, losing ‘some of the resilience and some of the vitality of his cousins who are still knocking about the streets’, whereas had they lived earlier ‘as one of the quicker-witted persons born into the working-classes, he would in all probability have had those wits developed in the jungle of the slums, where wit had to ally itself to energy and initia- tive’.89 Nonetheless, they do continue the theme of at least self-perceived etiolation. Kennedy, considering poems such as ‘Bookends I and II’, links a perceived loss of masculinity to education. If the poetry of Harrison and Dunn is ‘characterised by the fact that anxieties over what might be termed class performativity are inextricable from anxieties over gender performa- tivity’, then the elision of these performativities
derives from anxieties over whether cultural activity generally and poetry specifically is ‘real’ work for ‘real’ men. The poets find themselves translated not only out of their class but out of their expected gender roles […] If the poets of Harrison and Dunn’s generation find themselves translated not only out of their class but out of their expected gender roles, it is hardly surprising that the instrument of that translation—education—should come to be seen as the root of their difficulties.90 378 S. BYRNE
This is not to say that education or higher education is deplored or rejected; rather it is appropriated for the expression of gender and other anxieties. Morrison identifies in the work of Heaney and Harrison an obsessive, multilayered filiality.91 To Harrison he attributes guilt for having been ‘assimilated into a literate bourgeois culture which exploits and ignores’ people like his mother and father, and he sees Harrison cast as a prole Hamlet ‘separated through education from the parental home, accusing himself of inaction and unfiliality yet determined to avenge his father and his father’s class’.92 ‘Estrangement’ may be too strong a word for the rela- tionship between son and father in the case of some of the poets, who may perhaps be estranged from the class but not the individual. Heaney’s rec- ollections are respectful and admiring; Raine’s retrospectively so. Though most of the represented fathers and uncles are sparing of speech, in other respects they differ. The role of the father during the Second World War is not mentioned in any of Harrison’s elegies, nor is that generation of men represented as soldiers; there is no sense of failing to measure up as a warrior or patriot, though there is admiration for the actions of frame-breakers, rick-burners, and other rebels against perceived oppression. The forebear-heroes are the inarticulate uncles, Joe and Harry (‘Heredity’, The School of Eloquence, p. 121). If, as David Marcus argues, the preponderance of fathers in Irish poetry may represent an ancestral homage that is a substitute for the patri- otic fervour of past writing, perhaps in British writing it is not a substitute for but an aspect of class affiliation.93 Harrison’s poems express anger and resentment at the social system which wears out working-class people on poor pay, which deplores working-class language and culture and silences working-class voices. The father in Harrison’s poetry is represented through seemingly personal anecdote but is also representative of older men worn out from labour and of the class for whom poems such as ‘Marked with D’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 168) speak. Harrison de- estranges himself (though cannot rejoin) the class of his father by politicis- ing the elegies for him. Unlike the fathers in the work of Raine, Hughes, or Muldoon, Mr Harry Harrison is represented as a harsh critic: ‘A Good Read’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 152), ‘Book Ends’ 1 and 2 (The School of Eloquence, pp. 137–138). Whereas Heaney describes an amiable ‘masquerade’ on the part of his father that he never read a line of his son’s poetry,94 Harrison’s persona in the sonnets is adamant that though he’d like to be the poet his 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 379 father reads, that will never happen (‘The Rhubarbarians II’, The School of Eloquence, p. 124). Looking at Irish poetry from David Marcus’s perspective, it is possible to see poets separated from earlier generations by scholarships such as that which enabled Heaney to attend St Columb’s and to see the earlier gen- eration of fathers as standing for a past closer to the land, closer to semi- mythologised events such as the Easter Rising, and closer to a strong, stoical, heroic ideal of Irishness. As usual, though, the relationships in writing are more complicated than that. Heaney’s cameos of Mr Patrick Heaney illustrate the elegant minimal- ism of cattle-dealers’ speech; he labours gracefully in ‘Digging’ (Death of a Naturalist, 1966, OG, p. 3) and ‘Follower’ (Death of a Naturalist, p. 11); with his droving stick in ‘Squarings’, he is a ‘solid man’, a ‘pillar’, and a transcendent Hermes (from ‘Squarings’, ‘Crossings’, xxvii, Seeing Things, 1991, OG, p. 374). In a prose memoir, however, he is less mytho- logically and more humanly portrayed as joking to a neighbour about his son’s early reading in a way less abrasive than the reported remarks of Mr Harry Harrison but which may nonetheless suggest tension.95 Unlike the boys in Hughes’s poems, the narrator of Heaney’s is a fol- lower, a would-be acolyte, and apprentice, though on a divergent route, who in turn is followed by memory. Where the father in Harrison’s son- nets is, if not alienated from his labour, not the owner of his efforts or their products, and the son resents the hard work that wore out the father, in Heaney’s poems neither father nor son deplores the labour; there is pride and ownership in it. However much ‘embourgeoised’ the son, these poems do not wish on the father a different life. This harmony partly comes through Heaney’s famous trope of archaeology; the analogy between digging that is agricultural, archaeological, and mental; between the strata of landscape, the layers of memory, and the pages of books. The trope of trailing, followers, and antecedents is extensively developed in ‘Station Island’, in which the narrative ‘I’ follows and consults father fig- ures, mentors, and guides, including ‘Old father, mother’s son’ James Joyce (Station Island, 1984, p. 93).96 The representation of Mr William Carson in Ciaran Carson’s poems and prose is not that of Harrison’s disapproving and taciturn father but of a mesmerising storyteller, composer of poetry on the lavatory of the General Post Office, gifter of Ciaran Carson’s first spoken language (as opposed to the language of his first writing and early inspiration97), Irish.98 Carson, who was enabled by the Education Act to attend St Mary’s 380 S. BYRNE
Christian Brothers’ School before going up to Queen’s University Belfast in 1967. In an interview with Ada Edemariam in the Guardian, he recalled that Catholic students at Queen’s at that time were imbued with the idea that education could mean advancement and that the answer was to be in command of the language. In Heaney, they saw someone who was of Northern Ireland who wrote and spoke the English language well but with an accent of his own.99 A younger contemporary of Carson’s at Queen’s Belfast, Paul Muldoon, gained a scholarship to St Patrick’s College, Armagh, a school run by the Vincentian Fathers.100 In some ways, he is the very type of Richard Kearney’s ‘migrant minds’, not only in Kearney’s sense of the generation steeped in popular media yet keenly aware of inherited culture but also in his affiliations with modern American culture and his movement from agrarian tenantry to urban professional and academic.101 To mine his poems for references to that scholarship, those schooldays; to read his poetry as autobiographical, however, is at best limiting and at worst futile, as Bernard O’Donoghue demonstrates in an insightful review of Quoof (1983). O’Donoghue argues that the poems’ concern is with
the way personal memory, sense experience and language compete for the attention of the conscious mind. The process is not ratiocinative but sym- bolist and visionary […] the visions are symbolic representations (like Joyce’s Epiphanies) of the way words and experience come to inform the mind.102
Purely biographical readings, then, would be ‘crass’; the slivers of memory are as much visionary as the drug trances, and as O’Donoghue says, the past is as certain or uncertain, as true or untrue, as the present. The poems suggest ‘the continuity and discontinuity of experience at the same time: what is known or not, and what is believed or not’. Tracing Muldoon’s blood or poetic predecessors in representations of Mr Patrick Muldoon or Seamus Heaney, and any other single definitive identification, then, would oversimplify the function of these figures. Alan Jenkins notes that it would be tempting to see the divisions in Muldoon’s poetry as reflecting large issues, political or religious. This seems particu- larly true given that Muldoon grew up in a tiny Catholic enclave sur- rounded by nationalists, yet, as newcomers, not fully part of the Catholic community. Jenkins, however, argues that the divisions come from closer to home, from a relationship akin to that of Walter and Mrs Morel in 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 381
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, but with the filial affiliation reversed. He reit- erates that Mr Patrick Muldoon was a labourer, market gardener, and mushroom-grower, uneducated, almost illiterate, and quotes Paul Muldoon as describing him as ‘close to the soil—it sounds romantic but it’s what he was’, whereas Mrs Brigid Muldoon was an educated woman, with ‘a sense of that there was a world beyond’.103 She emerges from memoir and interview as less close to her son than was her husband, and as coming between him and the (predominately Protestant) Collegelands community to which the family moved after buying an acre of land for market gardening when Muldoon was four years old.104 She was quite taken with the idea of ‘status’ and had ‘high hopes for her children’, and though there were few books in the house, the children subscribed to improving periodicals such as ‘Finding Out’, ‘Look and Learn’, and ‘Classics Illustrated’; they had elocution and piano lessons.105 ‘The Mixed Marriage’ (Mules, 1977, NSP, p. 21), which has a representation rare in Muldoon’s work of a pre-adolescent, depicts a child born to parents from different social strata, a rural labourer and school teacher, flitting between ‘a hole in the hedge’ and ‘a room in the Latin Quarter’, yet Muldoon describes himself as more or less an autodidact. Perhaps to this poet of a generation removed in time from pre-scholarship days, scholarships were not such a large step on the social ladder, were less an entry into a different world, and were less alienating. One thing that his scholarship won Muldoon, however, was the teaching and belief in him of Sean O’Boyle, Gerard Quinn, John McCarter, and Jerry Hicks, who famously introduced him to Seamus Heaney.106 Unlike Heaney, Muldoon does not place his writing in descent from or parallel to Mr Patrick Muldoon’s labour, nor does he semi-mythicise that labour as Heaney does with the cattleman’s stick as staff of office. Though both men are shown working rhythmically, the man gathering mushrooms makes smaller, easier movements, nicking soft stems against his thumb rather than heaving heavy peat with a spade against his knee and foot, the almost mocking phrase ‘till kingdom come’, whilst seemingly extending the continuous line of movement, by hyperbole derails it (‘Gathering Mushrooms’, Quoof, NSP, pp. 68–70). The closest approach to the son’s attempt at the father’s physical skills is depicted in ‘The Coney’ (Meeting the British, 1987, NSP, pp. 115–116), in which the son admits that the scythe dulls so much more quickly in his hands than in those of his father and that extensive use has turned the whetstone, wrapped in his father’s old tweed cap, into a ‘lop-eared coney’. Whereas Heaney’s father is evoked 382 S. BYRNE by the sound of digging, Muldoon’s whistles through the gap (between the ears, through the years), and the comically shaped whetstone replaces the beautiful, reverenced canes and harvest bow of Mr Patrick Heaney (‘The Harvest Bow’, Field Work, 1979, OG, pp. 183–184). Where Heaney’s ground is legible to the speaker, Muldoon’s comic digger, Coulter, takes a bumpy half-acre of common, a graveyard, for his text in ‘Come into my Parlour’ (Why Brownlee Left, 1980, PMP, pp. 92–93). The lines
The grave of my mother, My father’s grave, and his father’s and the proleptic of ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ (The Annals of Chile, 1994, NSP, pp. 155–156)
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father he could barely tell one from the other are reminiscent of the many references to mothers, fathers, and graves in songs of Irish uprisings and of phrases such as ‘The Sash My Father Wore’, showing that emblems of the familial past easily elide into emblems of sectarianism, just as ‘family plots’ can become stories or conspiracies.107 The references in ‘Mixed Marriage’ to Caravats (carabhaití, ‘cravats’ or ‘nooses’), the feuding opponents of the Shanvests (sean-bheisteanna, ‘old waistcoats, in the early nineteenth century), and Ribbon Boys (a Catholic society whose members wore a green ribbon in a buttonhole) also might point to past divisions and oppositions. Juxtaposed with ‘hunting with ferrets’ to which the father returns once the mother retires, however, these seem more like ironised stereotypical signifiers of working-class Catholic Republican male life. ‘Immrama’108 might be another direct address to poems of Heaney’s or to other poets who have undertaken pilgrimages whose stations are places and times in the lives of their fathers. The places are not described with nostalgia or reverence: the mud-walled cabin is said to breed TB and scar- latina as well as the father of the poem; the mountain is ‘coming down with’ hazel; the building site is ‘a slum’ (Why Brownlee Left, p. 40). Muldoon doesn’t share what MacKay calls Heaney’s ‘association of poetry with rural traditions and a benign Wordsworthian egotistical sublime’.109 Rather than a simple inversion from the high heroic of the Irish stories to 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 383 low reality, the poem moves from the biographical ‘almost’ (the father almost took passage to Argentina) to the envisioned but not-quite-made- it: he went no further than Brazil, where he’s drinking with a possible Nazi. A father appears in glimpses through the poems, in ‘Tell’, ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, ‘Cherish the Ladies’ (Quoof, p. 74), and, after his death, in ‘The Mirror’ (Quoof, pp. 108–109). The glimpses are linked into an asso- ciative chain, as O’Donoghue shows:
[in ‘Gathering Mushrooms’] the poet’s father ‘reaches far into his own shadow’. In ‘From Strength to Strength’ […] the Charolais heifer-calf ‘will plunge out of her own shadow/as if from the bath’. And in the next poem, ‘Cherish the Ladies’, the circuit of images is welded together as, in his ‘last poem about my father’, we see the father filling a galvanised bath for the heifers to drink.110
Whereas the farming fathers in Heaney’s and Paul Muldoon’s (b.1951) poems are strongly associated with rural ties and the past, those of Harrison and Raine are of the urban working class and uninheritable occupations (though Harrison records several generations of miners in his lineage) that leave less weight of guilt on the later generations enabled by scholarships to choose not to take them up. The father in Harrison’s sonnet ‘Turns’ (THCP, p. 162) is a model of labouring-class pride and self-sufficiency. Rather than self-accusation or sense of failure on the part of the narra- tor, Harrison’s poems record taunts of effeminacy and, implicitly, class betrayal from the father, who ‘dubbed me Paganinny and it hurt’ (‘An Old Score’, The School of Eloquence, p. 150); ‘I got one of his you-stuck-up bugger looks’ (‘A Good Read’, The School of Eloquence, p. 152). The refer- ence to writing poetry making the narrator seem a ‘cissy’ in ‘Self Justification’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 186) comes from ‘the lads’, just as the epithet ‘fairy’ comes from the cracker neighbour in ‘The Lords of Life’. The association by others of non-manual work with a less than ‘manly’ man is perhaps compensated for by representations of the poem’s ‘I’ at physical labour. In ‘Cypress and Cedar’ (THCP, pp. 258–262) the narrator has ‘laboured’ with his hands ‘for hours’, ‘sawing fenceposts’, cutting, dragging, and stacking. In ‘Social Mobility’ (U.S. Martial, 1981, THCP, p. 117), the narrator ‘slaves at nuances’, and ‘Facing North’ (Selected Poems, 1984, THCP, pp. 218–219) overtly aligns the labour of writing poetry with difficult, manual labour. 384 S. BYRNE
Masculinity in the poems may also be performed by what Morrison calls the metrical muscularity of Harrison’s writing.111 Alan Brownjohn describes the School of Eloquence sonnets as ‘hammered into crude contain- ers for heavy irony and [Harrison’s] very own brand of chip-on-the- shoulder coarseness’.112 The hammering metaphor is apt, given Harrison’s representation of himself in competition with other men (‘The Lords of Life’, Selected Poems, pp. 243–247) as well as alone, and perhaps the attempt to align poetry with the manual labour of the preceding genera- tion, but the accusation of working-class chip with its suggestion of a reduction of social ills to personal resentment seems as crass as any nar- rowly biographical reading. The concept of ‘crude containers’ may be more useful as a vehicle for the representation of gender in poets of the mid- to later twentieth century. As Kennedy points out:
Dunn and Harrison, like their immediate contemporary Seamus Heaney, accept conventional masculinity and femininity as rigid but entirely natural categories with measurable accountabilities and performativities [….] It would be unrealistic to expect these poets to map an alternative conception of masculinity as something other than a binary or to acknowledge a contin- gent continuum of masculinities.113
Kennedy’s assertion that men of working-class origins who came to adult- hood between 1930 and 1955 could not have acknowledged gender as anything other than binary because ‘a contingent continuum of masculini- ties’ was ‘a development of a later period’ seems itself too binary in its dismissal of conceptions of gender before 1955. He usefully draws atten- tion to Maurizia Boscagli’s study of early twentieth-century masculinity, which identifies the origin of the emphasis on the muscular male body as the embodiment of masculinity.
[T]he critical moment for this new emphasis was the trial of Oscar Wilde because of its public identification of the homosexual with the artist. [Boscagli] argues that while ‘the characteristic male body of the turn of the century was that of the unassuming “black-coated clerk”’, by the 1930s ‘a whole new order of flagrant male corporeality had been put on show’. The emergence of the tanned, muscular male body was a reaction to the unmanly aesthete. The result, Boscagli concludes, was the construction of ‘masculin- ity as well as femininity [as] a speculary structure of gender identity founded on lack and haunted by its excluded others—in fact, uncomfortably incor- porating them.’114 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 385
The problem with this for figuration of the urban working-class male of the 1930s to 1950s is that the body was rarely that of a Hollywood pin-up. Fathers who laboured, in foundries, delivering loads, making roads, or other occupations, would be selectively and disproportionately rather than symmetrically muscled, whilst long hours underground or in lightless buildings gave little opportunity for tanning. An industrial worker such as a miner might be an icon of masculinity at the time, but he was likely to be pale, shorter than his middle- and upper-class contemporaries, and, like Harrison’s baker father, with damaged lungs. The weakening rather than strengthening action of poorly regulated manual labour is emphasised in the sonnets from The School of Eloquence such as ‘Marked with D. I and II’ (pp. 137–138), which represent the father of the poems fuelling or stok- ing ovens. Some later additions to the sequence such as ‘The Icing Hand’ (p. 169), and ‘Deep and Crisp and Even’ (p. 170), refer to the less strenu- ous skills of baking scones and puff pastry and icing cakes. The former poems make political points, the father representing exploited labouring-class men, whereas the latter are more personal elegies which record the similarities and differences between father and son. ‘Flagrant masculinity’ in Boscagli’s words, as presented in the popular culture to which poets of the mid-twentieth century were exposed, was entwined with physical strength, industry, dominance over nature, and war, so that to perform these was to perform masculinity. Boys’ comics offered role models of soldiers, explorers, sportsmen, frontiersmen, and cowboys. Hughes’s memoirs recall time spent following his brother as he shot and trapped, time exploring the moors above Mytholmroyd and the farmland around Mexborough. Bentley, like Ely and other of Hughes’s biographers, notes that Hughes’s boyhood world was small; the favoured walks, camp sites, and hunting grounds were all within a ten-minute walk of the Hughes’ home. That home was not a farm or hamlet or isolated cottage but an industrial landscape of mills, factories, railway yards, and mines. For Bentley, this explains Hughes’s use of an industrial register to describe nature. In Hughes’s work we see on one hand the ‘pressing Romantic desire to experience nature as a primary, even primeval state—to recover the natural man (and woman)’ and on the other the ‘acute aware- ness of the oppressive historical experience that structures this very desire [….] industrialised labour and industrialised warfare’.115 Bentley also points out that war metaphors appear in Hughes’s work ‘whenever he touches on questions of class’.116 The North of England becomes a meton- ymy of masculinity, through both industrial and geological landscapes and 386 S. BYRNE association with the Vikings. This has antecedents before the twentieth century, for example, in William Morris’s translations of Viking sagas, and in this period persists in the work of northern poets. James Kirkup’s ‘To the Ancestral North’ in 1957 claims allegiance:
‘From that elemental land Of iron whitenesses and long auroras My Viking fathers sprang In armoured nakedness’117
Ted Hughes’s ‘Thistles’ employs the trope for a tough invasive plant.
a revengeful burst Of resurrection, a grasped fistful Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking and in ‘Warriors of the North’, hypermasculine Scandinavian invaders ‘trample underfoot’ the heritage of the Anglo-Saxons, and steal the ‘elab- orate, patient gold’ of the artistic ‘Gaels’. Seamus Heaney receives messages from landscape and forebears in ‘North’118 and ‘Belderg’119; Basil Bunting weaves Eric Bloodaxe into Briggflatts.120 Ian Duhig parodies this plundering of the myth-kitty in ‘Ken’s Videos—Seahouses’.121 Whereas for Harrison northern industrial decay is represented by ‘a worked-out pit’ but mostly by unemployed men (v., THCP, pp. 263–279), the northern landscape for Hughes is a site of war and occupation, as the lexis of industry or war breaks through like rocks on the moors, and every- where is evidence of the decay of production.
here the leaf-loam silence Is old siftings of sewing machines and shuttles, And the silence of ant warfare on pine-needles Is like the silence of clogs over cobbles. (‘Hardcastle Crags’, HCP, p. 456)
The end of industry and the clearance of its clutter from the land is wel- comed, however, so that the land that 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 387
fell asleep
Under migraine of headscarves and clatter Of clog-irons and looms stretches ‘awake’ and ‘returns to itself’. Chapels and chimneys vanish, and the land is retored. (‘The Trance of Light’, Remains of Elmet, HCP, p. 459)
The landscape of Hughes’s Elmet is haunted by war as the synecdoches of mill towns—steep wet cobbles, football pitches, and crown greens—are succeeded by those of death—cenotaphs, gravemounds, trenches, and two-minutes’ silence (‘First, Mills’, Remains of Elmet, pp. 462–463). Though Mr William Hughes is represented by Hughes in a number of poems, he is not depicted as a role model whom the narrator aspires to follow, nor a macho figure making the man of sedentary occupation seem effete. The son in the poems is first a small boy, laying on the carpet, the father’s ‘luckless double’ brought into the war, among ‘jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shellcases and craters’ (‘Out 1, The Dream Time’, Wodwo, 1967, HCP, p. 165). In ‘Dust As We Are’ (Wolfwatching, 1989, HCP, p. 753), the son is an equal, listening intently to his father’s silences as in the letters he describes listening to his memories of the war122; sharing; inhabiting. Another father figure, Hughes’s uncle, is represented in ‘My Uncle’s Wound’ (Uncollected, HCP, p. 100) and ‘Walt’ (Wolfwatching, p. 770), which each relate the same story of the visit to High Wood, where Mr Walter Farrar was wounded. ‘My Uncle’s Wound’ merges now and then, Ted and Walt, so that memory and narrative are lived in the present moment. In ‘Walt’, we learn that the narrator is the same age as Walt was when he was wounded. Unusually, there is dialogue, but it is sparse and repetitive. This inarticulacy, the repeated ‘Aye’ that in Harrison’s work is a jaunty stage act contrasting and continuous with Classical Greek, is not an affirmation of life but an acknowledgement: Walt’s fingers have found the wound’s exact spot; his memory has found the place, the time; he is there. These men and their memories are an acknowledged source of the poems of war such as ‘Bayonet Charge’ (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957, HCP, p. 43), ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’ (The Hawk in the Rain, p. 44), and ‘Six Young Men’ (The Hawk in the Rain, p. 45). War is a haunting, in poems as late as the Laureate poem ‘A Masque for Three Voices’ (Rain- 388 S. BYRNE charm for the Duchy, 1992, HCP, p. 821). In the letter to Gammage, Hughes writes of Jon Silkin (b.1930) and Jon Stallworthy (b.1935) as obsessed by the First World War, their fathers’ war.123 This may better be applied to much of Hughes’s poetry. Jeffrey Meyers reports that Hughes’s father’s memories of the First World War not only passed on ‘trauma and survivor’s guilt’ to his son, but also that the stories were ‘so vivid, his psy- chological wound so palpable’ that Hughes felt as though he had experi- enced that war.124 Though he lived through the Second World War, and received first-hand reports from his brother, ten years older and serving in the RAF in Africa, the Great War remained the more traumatic, more enduring, and more shocking ‘experience’. In a letter to Nick Gammage, Hughes explains the way in which for him the First World War was not ancient history as for most people at the time, but an intimate experience and a source of his mythology.125 For his generation, he wrote that war rather than one that they lived through formed the subject of their poetry. The mythology he was using, he said, was shared, lived, and felt by anyone under seventy years old (in 1991). Hughes received war through verbally transmitted personal memories in intimate surroundings and texts studied formally. He heard of the Great War through his father and uncle and through poetry, especially that of Owen; he received the Second World War through his brother and the poetry of Keith Douglas. Whilst he writes admiringly of Owen, as some- one who seemed contemporary because of that shared mythology,126 and whose work he ‘swallowed […] as deeply as anyone well could’, Hughes also expresses two reservations about Owen. The second reservation was Owen’s relatively late arrival at the Somme (in October 1916):
I know he made up for it [… but] I held it against him. I’ve never been able to reconcile my liking for his poems with the fact that he was still pursuing the cultivated life in France quite late in 1915.127
The first reservation is more telling in terms of poetry, personal history, and class; Hughes writes that a reservation about Owen was that he was an officer, in contrast to his own father, who remained an infantryman throughout the war, refused promotion, and told ‘strange stories about some officers’.128 This affiliation with the non-officer class and slight cool- ness towards the officer did not extend to Robert Graves, who was com- missioned as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, perhaps because 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 389
Graves signed up early in the war, perhaps because Graves removed the war poems from his later collections, and perhaps because Hughes associ- ated Graves with the one sacred story of The White Goddess (1948) rather than with the wartime writing.129 Whether, as Meyers suggests, Hughes in some way felt that he had experienced the Great War and imaginatively projected himself into it, or he sought what Paul Fussell, using Northrop Frye’s term, suggests was characteristic of poets since the Second World War, a modal grandfather,130 war imagery pervades much of his writing. It is important to distinguish between ahistorical, non-specific imagery of violence, predation, and Nietzschean dominance and imagery specifically located in war or a par- ticular war. A few poems specify time or place, ‘Flanders’, for example (Recklings, 1966, HCP, p. 128), and those mentioned above. More employ generic symbols of war. Because mud, craters, and poppies have become iconic of the First World War, Hughes’s view of fields as clay clutching the ankles and threatening to drown the walker (‘Hawk in the Rain’, The Hawk in the Rain, p. 19) may be read as connoting that war. The despoiled landscape of war is transposed onto the landscape of the Calder Valley in works such as Remains of Elmet (1979), and mourning for the dead of the war projected onto Hughes’s earliest home terrains.131 The analogy is no more grounded in the specifics of time and place than in the simile of generations of thistles replacing the dead like ranks and generations of soldiers (‘Thistles’, Wodwo, p. 147). Similarly, the use of the semantic field of bullets, automatic weapons, coiled metal, and triggers to describe birds (‘Thrushes’, ‘Skylarks’, Lupercal, 1960, HCP, pp. 82–83); Wodwo (pp. 173–176) could come from the Second World War, as the Cold War could provide imagery for ‘Wind’ (The Hawk in the Rain, pp. 36–37) and other poems, but we should hesitate to pin this down too readily and too firmly to autobiography. Whereas inherited trauma and guilt might engender fear and loathing of warfare and produce pacifist poetry, or a pathological avoidance of the subject, for Meyers, Hughes had an ‘instinctive taste for violence’ and produced the most bloody and horrific poetry since John Webster. Meyers aligns the soldiers of Hughes’s poems with predatory animals:
his doomed soldiers have the feral primitivism of his hunting and hunted beasts. At war with themselves and with men, these animals have, like preda- tors tearing out the entrails of their prey, a primeval instinct to kill.132 390 S. BYRNE
Yet he goes on to say that Hughes ‘contrasted the natural world of gentler animals with the murder of men in battle’. Though the poems are anti-war in showing its hideous realities and rejecting the rhetorical abstractions used to promote it, they are not pacifistic. Hughes himself wrote that his imagination was ‘excited’ by the war ‘between vitality and death’.133 His ‘The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot’ (The Hawk in the Rain, pp. 47–48) presents a narrator distanced from his victims’ suffering and death and made to feel small by past warriors who fought and killed hand- to-hand, amid the blood and bones. This is one poem among many and doesn’t make any overt claim to superiority for the ancient warriors; his poems, Hughes asserted, celebrated ‘warriors of either side’. Nonetheless, the opposition between war at one remove and war conducted with mus- cular relish in accordance with ‘natural law’ emphasises the connection between violence and the performance of masculinity. Miners are emblematic of many of the qualities associated with the North: working-class, militant, strong, essential yet undervalued, masculine (though women and children work mines). Coal miners, spe- cifically striking miners, feature in three works by poets from the North of England, each born in or near a city built on industry, and coal: one born in Leeds in 1937, one in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1948, and one in Sheffield in 1985. These are Tony Harrison’sv ., Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch,134 and Helen Mort’s ‘Scab’.135 The occasion of Harrison’s v. invites comparison with Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. The abab mostly iambic pentameter quatrains follow Gray’s structure, but Harrison employs ellipses, broken words, and slang in contrast to Gray’s formality. Whereas Gray, the son of a scrivener and a milliner, describes rural workers, demonstrating his narrator’s social superiority by his cultural references (Hampden, Milton, Cromwell, Muses), Harrison’s ‘I’ describes urban unemployed in terms of Harp lager, football, and graffiti, and his own in terms of Alban Berg,Hamlet , and Rimbaud. More than Gray, Harrison’s ‘I’ establishes his persona as a poet, grouped with Wordsworth and Byron and associated with the Muses. Though his unletter’d muse, the skinhead, is revealed as the poet’s alter ego, the social and cultural distances between the respective pairings of poets and plebeians are made about equally unequal. That is, until the skin opens his mouth, then, as Luke Spencer notes, he is revealed less as a blindly destructive hooligan than a witty class warrior.136 Corcoran notes that some lines of v. could be even be Gray’s.137 In Harrison’s poem coal is a significant absence that makes a void beneath the poet’s feet and the 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 391 occasion of a stanza about the fire burning at home; the mine a sign of the end of productivity and employment; the strike part of life’s divisions:
class versus class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM, personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM. (THCP, p. 266)
Harrison began to publish in little magazines and private presses and moved to Faber and Penguin; MacSweeney was nominated for the Oxford Poetry Chair at 19 and his first collection was published by Hutchinson, but subsequent works were under smaller imprints. The black torch of MacSweeney’s title poem is in part coal itself and in part the hope of the striking miners and their families. Black Torch was instigated by a miners’ strike which took place a decade before the 1984 clashes that Harrison references in v. Like Harrison, MacSweeney uses the Prometheus myth to represent insurrection, but his Prometheus is no marble statue or pristine linen-wrapped demi-god carrying a flame neatly held in a reed; his miners show the cost of getting that fire.
black dusted prometheans black fur of moles jet phlegm chalked in black dust white eye balls teeth groin black suede tongue ripping fire for the national hearth. (p. 17)
v. is narrated by a single persona, a representation of the poet; it has one location, a chronologically linear structure within which are meditations and memories, and a theme predicated on the opposition of abstractions: unity and division. Though the 1984 miners’ strike is referenced, the nar- rator’s personal life and more general musings are centre stage. Black Torch charts the planning, execution, and aftermath of miners’ strikes through multiple voices: the miners, the owners, and documents, and in reportage, in achronological snapshots and snippets. It ranges from the distant past to Halfden, the Viking first king of Northumbria, to the mid-nineteenth century, to the 1960s and 1970s,138 and ends in the pres- ent day. It covers child labour, accidents, evictions, solidarity, scab labour, corruption, resistance, and the implacable force of capitalist interests: 392 S. BYRNE
management say the men earn over 3 and 6 a day the union denies it their lawyer says it is not true it is only 2 bob a day pitmen everywhere should be paid more
they are asking for 28 per cent its impossible to offer it we cannot guarantee sales an increase of this sort to men injured in the pits would mean more men pretending injury its already up to ten shillings a week why should he be able to stay on in his pit cottage when he is disabled out of work and therefore non-productive. (p. 18)
We hear dialogue, pronouncements, printed material, proclamations.
that the See of Durham represented, initiated and actively partook in fierce accumulation of common land this warlike custom laid the base of ecclesiastical capitalism in northumbria and the churches’ vast collection of properties, in other words profit without work. (p. 33)
The poem ends, though, like v., on the present and the personal. ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ depicts the poet at home, watching TV news coverage of depressing and frightening events, watching his wife sleep, warmed by a coal fire. He reminds himself that the coal was ripped out by real people and implicitly that he is as compromised as anyone, part of the modes of production that exploits the pit workers. Mort’s ‘Scab’ recounts the battle between striking miners and police at Orgreave in 1984, making an uneven equation between the community’s hounding of the unwanted, out-of-place scab labour with the feelings of being out of place in a Cambridge college. The initial conceit of the poem is a Biblical parallel; a lobbed stone initiating the violence is like a star hanging over Orgreave. The third section of the poem describes the re- enactment of the fight by the conceptual artist Jimmy Deller in 2001, an 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 393 event concerned to produce a simulacrum of authenticity in the manner of the Sealed Knot. The irony of ex-policemen and ex-miners who had fought in 1984 participating in this reification is noted without comment. That they ‘play’ themselves or others makes them interchangeable.
This is a reconstruction. Nobody will get hurt. There are miners playing coppers, ex-coppers shouting Maggie, Out. (III, p. 19)
Further reification is imagined as the strike or its reconstruction becomes a blockbuster film neatly sanitised and made positive in the style of Brassed Off:
a film that gives the town its own brass band, cuts out the knuckles fringed with blood grafts in a panorama of the Moors. This is our heritage. An actor artfully roughed up, thirty years of editing to keep the landfills out of shot. (V, p. 22)
Mothers The same poets whose poetic personae measure themselves against the achievements of male forebears also demonstrate a strong affiliation to mothers. Several of these represented mothers are ‘Lawrentian’, in Raine’s phrase, in that they have a working-class background and aspirations for their sons to gain qualifications which will enable them to avoid jobs entailing manual labour. Raine’s ‘The Season in Scarborough 1923’ (CRR, 1984, pp. 82–84) uses characteristically vivid simile and metaphor to catalogue the material signifiers of class difference as perceived by a woman in service and the connection between her and (one assumes) her son, decades later, affluent, literary.139 The ways of the wealthy—silver dish covers, bidets, avocado pears, exotic to the woman—are matters for letters home, and she feels herself part of a different world: ‘dropping curtsies’ to brogues put out for polishing, and wearing a linen ‘tiara’. Yet the time in Scarborough, in the word of wealth, is a ‘season’, ended when she packs, 394 S. BYRNE
‘suddenly homesick/ for the real’, an expiration made parallel with the narrator’s about-to-expire season ticket to ‘literary London’. Whereas Ted Hughes’s father appears in the poems as himself, the mother role is more often taken by mother goddesses, the Great Mother,140 or the natural environment.141 Bentley finds in Hughes’s sense of claustro- phobia in Mexborough and freedom on the moors above the town the legacy of his mother’s sense of entrapment and her vicarious ambitions.142 This may be explicit in ‘Leaf Mould’, which associates the mother of the poem, who taught the ‘you’ to walk there, with Hardcastle Crags and its valley, and with the transference of ambition: ‘You were her step-up trans- former’ (Wolfwatching, p. 768). Harrison’s ‘Currants I’ delineates the worlds of mother and father, home and work, the son’s fastidious rejection of the currants into which his father’s sweat, mark of manual labour, has dripped, marking him out as belonging to the latter: ‘Next Sunday you can stay ‘ome wi’ yer mother!’ (The School of Eloquence, p. 164). The world of the mother is also the world of work, though, unending housework. The mother in the School of Eloquence poems performs the traditional working-class role, cooking or cleaning, or is represented by the remains or absence of these: ‘Clearing’ (THCP, p. 155); ‘The Effort’ (THCP, p. 174), but she is also the nurturer of literacy and education (‘Isolation’, THCP, p. 153); ‘Testing the Reality’ (THCP, p. 173), and the source of aspiration (‘Turns’, THCP, p. 162); ‘Breaking the Chain’ (THCP, p. 166). ‘Book Ends I’ (THCP, p. 137) in particular represents a woman who has per- formed the conventional role of wife and mother, providing meals and presiding over them in a way that gives an appearance of unity. Once her food and she are gone, the class division between father and son prevails over family ties. Heaney refers to a ‘Sons and Lovers phase’ in his ‘Clearances VI’ (The Haw Lantern, 1987, OG, p. 312). The closeness between mother and son is unexpressed but intensely evident in shared space and activity. Peeling potatoes in the female realm of the kitchen (‘Clearances III’, p. 309) and folding bed linen (‘Clearances V’, p. 311) become the shared rituals of religious observance in the sixth poem. Catholicism, particularly its Mariolatry aspect, though it has a patriarchal structure which denies women the priesthood, is strongly associated with the feminine, and Heaney notes that both religion and his sensibility came to him through his mother.143 Though mass is a shared communal rite, the narrator’s tight focus is on the one-to-one as the two kneel together, and though the 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 395 death-bed rituals, extreme unction, the family grief, and the farewells, include an unnamed ‘some’, it is experienced largely as one-to-one: the priest saying the prayers for the dying; the son recollecting, the husband, speaking more to the dying woman than in their lives together; the son, now an ‘I’ alone in the final poem of the sequence (‘Clearances VIII’, p. 314). The rich seam of memory evoked by the italicised epigraph to the poems (OG, p. 306) contains vignettes of warm partnership, in the kitchen when just the two of them peeled potatoes when everyone else was at mass, the midnight fire and the Paschal candlestick, which are replaced in the final sonnet by emptiness, and emptiness emphasised by the absent shape of what had filled it. The image of the chestnut tree grown from a sapling in a jam jar and now hewn and uprooted powerfully suggests the gap above ground and below, always equally important in Heaney’s work. Like a tongue probing the gap of a missing tooth or a spade in the earth, the sequence probes and tests memories and absences. As in Harrison’s poems, members of the older generation, particularly the mothers, both encourage the younger to better themselves through education and are suspicious of what may follow, especially affectation and assumed superiority. The mother in Heaney’s poem is more challenging than proud of her son’s scholarship, though Mrs Margaret Heaney is remembered as an early inspiration of Heaney’s love of language as she recited ‘lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling’.144 To placate her imagined sense of betrayal, the son avoids too much modification of the lexis and syntax of his early, local speech, indicating that he hasn’t gone too far from his origins and identity by saying ‘aye’ and ‘naw’. The surprise for the reader of ‘Clearances IV’ poem is that the son sees governing his tongue as a betrayal of what he knew ‘better’ and thinks of using the ‘wrong’ grammar, rather than a dialect whose grammar is as cor- rect as that of Standard English (OG, p. 310). This betrayal is represented as an acceptable sacrifice in the cause of remaining allied to the mother, but it seems a betrayal of the mother tongue, of Irish-inflected English. The association of mother and the family home in the imagery of twentieth-century poetry persisted in a time when women of all classes might work outside the home. Robert Crawford notes that ‘the poetic celebrants of home at the moment [1993] tend not to be women’ and that for male poets such as Harrison, Dunn, and Raine, answering ‘the pulls and torsions’ of the question ‘where’s home?’ produces much of their verse.145 396 S. BYRNE
Northern Broadsides: Independent Presses, Regionality, and Class Little magazines are also a marker of milieu. For instance, a survey of literary taste for any particular period can be made by analysing who was or was not published where, a process which tests under the pressure of evidence later assertions and remembrances of movements and schools. If there was an Auden Generation, did the poets concerned tend to be published in particu- lar places? If they did, were there poets who specifically weren’t published in those magazines? Were there particular magazines for that grouping? And so on.146
The ‘British Poetry Revival’ in the 1960s and 1970s147 produced a pleth- ora of arts journals, arts centres, and independent publishers. Some of the ‘underground’ counter-cultural and radical magazines attempted to divorce publication and distribution from the usual modes of circulation and trade, resisting commodification of the texts.148 Migrant, for example, founded by Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer two years after Turnbull founded Migrant Press, advised its readers that it would be published irregularly:
For it to pretend to be a ‘magazine’ with a ‘public’ would be absurd. There is no such public […] what subscription rate could there be? And so, it will be sent to anyone who wishes to receive it. That is, to anyone interested to read it. Thus our ambition will be to have a minimal number of readers; but for those readers to be maximally interested.149
Most of these were cheaply produced, short-lived, and narrowly focused on the interests of the editors. Examples include Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag and Tom Raworth’s Outburst (1959–1964). Others were longer- lived, such as Michael Horovitz’s New Departures and John Cotton’s Priapus (1962–1972). Horovitz was one of the organisers of the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ held at the Albert Hall in June 1965, whose aftermath was ‘an incredibly vibrant period’ for poetry,150 and sub- sequently edited the anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain.151 Horovitz’s ‘Afterwords’, ‘which happily announces the end of the Movement’, replaces what it sees as arid atten- tion to craft with a ‘wilful spirit of enthusiasm’ extolling the spirit of William Blake and the influence of Allen Ginsberg.152 At the same time, several independent publishing houses were established, including Stuart 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 397 and Deirdre Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press (1965–1974), Tom Raworth’s Matrix (1961–1964), and his and Barry Hall’s Goliard Press (1965, acquired by Cape in 1967), John Fuller’s Sycamore Press (1968–1992), and Peter Jay’s Anvil Press (1968, merged with Carcanet in 2015). Enitharmon and Barry MacSweeney’s Blacksuede Boot Press were founded slightly later, in 1969 and 1970, respectively. Many of these smaller non-metropolitan, non-conglomerate presses came together in 1966 to form the Association of Little Presses.153 The latter was to be influential when Eric Mottram became editor of Poetry Review and some of its members joined the General Council of the Poetry Society and attempted to revitalise the society and poetry in Britain in general. The establishment of the poetry bookshop, the development of workshops and readings of experimental poetry, and Mottram’s printing of the work of younger poets seemed to achieve this, but following dispute and disagree- ments and a report which recommended increased control of the Society by the Arts Council, Barry MacSweeney, briefly Chair of the society, led a mass resignation in 1977.154 The Association also campaigned in the early 1970s for ‘a change in the role of the Poet Laureateship, from an “out to grass” pension to paid ombudsman, spokesman and ambassador for the national interest of all poets’.155 On the death of the then Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, CBE, in 1972, John Betjeman was appointed to the post. The history of Carcanet, recorded on the Carcanet Press website, indi- cates its Oxford and Cambridge, and therefore middle-class (at least by association), origins.
Carcanet was a literary magazine, founded in 1962. Michael Hind, a mem- ber of the original editorial committee, recalls how the idea was to ‘collect together and publish as a periodical poetry, short fiction, and ‘intelligent criticism of all the arts’; there were to be both student and senior members’ contributions. The intention was to link Oxford and Cambridge. The first issue, Michael Hind writes, appeared in 1962, with a plain white cover with a drawing of a gorget—blue on white. There were thirty-two pages of text—all poetry and short fiction. No price was shown on the cover of this or the subsequent issue. He adds, The editors, in Oxford and Cambridge were respectively Richard Emeny and John Halliday. I was a member of the Oxford editorial committee, along with two others. Senior members were Neville Coghill for Oxford and Kingsley Amis for Cambridge. The first issue was rather serious in tone, although a lighter touch came from a then tutor in English at Merton, Tony Nuttall, in the form of comic car- toon ‘elucidations’ on the magazine title. No ‘big names’ appeared in the 398 S. BYRNE
first two issues, although C.A. Trypanis, beginning then to be more widely known, has an appealing short poem on Delos. Some contributors claimed much space: Peter Mansfield (1942–2008) filled nine pages with poetry and prose in a lyric-ecstatic mode in the second edition. The editorial committee in Oxford included Roger Chinery and Roger Green along with Michael Hind. The Cambridge committee consisted of Richard Burns and Mike Duffett.156
From Carcanet grew the publishing house Carcanet Press, and the maga- zine PN Review, founded by Michael Schmidt OBE, FRSL. Schmidt stud- ied at Harvard and Oxford and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow, Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. The mani- festo of the house emphasises international authors and translation.
We have forged strong Anglo-European and Anglo-Commonwealth links. Our focal interest is in literature in English—all the Englishes now spoken and written. In 1999 the Press acquired Oxford University’s fine poetry list. Oxford Poets now emanate from Manchester. Latterly we have forged close links with Glasgow, where Carcanet has an editorial office in the School of English and Scottish Literature and Language. Since the age of the venerable Bede, translation has been crucial to the growth of our literature. Carcanet is naturally active here, producing award- winning translations of the classics and of new work from around the world. Dedicated to discovery, appraisal and reappraisal, Carcanet is a unique survivor in the precarious world of literary imprints. Our editorial continuity has generated a list of deep coherence and innovation, not only among the authors rediscovered but also among the new authors we publish. In an age teased by post-Modern relativism and post-millennial uncer- tainty, where literary value sometimes plays second fiddle to the demon profit and that other demon of ephemeral political imperatives, Carcanet takes its bearing from Modernism. It bases its activities on the best practice of the last century, during which great lists were forged—some of which did not survive as independents into the changing twenty-first century.
Though a limited company with shareholders, Carcanet is supported by the Arts Council of England.
Carcanet became a Limited Company in Oxford in 1969. It had several shareholders and was always in need of capital. In 1983 Robert Gavron (now Lord Gavron) acquired 100% of the company and has remained its guarantor and, with Arts Council England, its supporter since that time. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 399
The Board of Directors includes The Lady Gavron (Chairman), Andrew Biswell, Cato Marks, Dr Robyn Marsack, Sue Roberts, Christine Steel (Finance Director), Andrew Stokes, Michael Schmidt FRSL (Editorial and Managing Director), Nicholas Spice and Mark Thwaite. Alison Boyle of Arts Council England often attends.
PN Review, earlier Poetry Nation, similarly describes its history:
Each issue includes an editorial, letters, news and notes, articles, interviews, features, poems, translations, and a substantial book review section. Poetry Nation was founded by Michael Schmidt and Professor Brian Cox at the Victoria University of Manchester. Cox and Schmidt were joined on the editorial board by Professor Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson. The magazine has been under the General Editorship of Michael Schmidt since his colleagues retired some decades ago. Through all its twists and turns, responding to social, technological and cultural change, PN Review has stayed the course. While writers of moment, poets and critics, essayists and memoirists, and of course readers, keep find- ing their way to the glass house, and people keep throwing stones, it will have a place.157
The choice of endorsement to appear on the website is indicative.
‘[The magazine has] attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health. In so doing it has often succeeded in broadening the horizons of our view of twentieth-century poetry and in encouraging poets to be ambitious about their concerns.’ Cairns Craig Times Literary Supplement ‘[P]robably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.’ John Ashbery, Executive Editor, Art News ‘The most important journal concerned with poetry, [it] is gaining its proper recognition, surrounding its admirably intellectual criticism with an even richer spread of actual poems.’ Marilyn Butler, Editorial Board, Women: a Cultural Review ‘[T]he cleverest of the current poetry magazines.’ Ian Hamilton, editor of The Review and The New Review ‘[W]orthy of careful reading and digestion, […] with new poetry, trans- lations, interviews and critical essays. A little daunting for the common reader, perhaps, but there are serious and intelligent minds behind it.’ John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine and Penguin New Writing 1946–1950 400 S. BYRNE
‘Your magazine is excellent.’ Octavio Paz, editor of Plural and Vuelta ‘[T]he premier British poetry journal. Its coverage is broad and gener- ous: from John Ashbery to new young English poets, from essays on Continental poetics and fiction to reviews of neglected poets both living and dead. At a time when poetry is largely neglected, [it] continues to make an eloquent case for its centrality to our culture.’ Marjorie Perloff, Advisory Editor, American Poetry Review, Contemporary Literature, Oxford Poetry Review, Paideuma, Sulfur; Editorial Board, Modern Language Quarterly, Modernism/Modernity ‘It would be fine to have a cultural revival based on Manchester instead of Oxbridge.’ Edgell Rickword, editor Calendar of Modern Letters, Left Review, Scrutinies, Our Time ‘[H]igh-toned but bracing.’ Boyd Tonkin, Books Editor, Independent ‘[It has an] elevated stroppiness of tone and a sense of breaking new ground that I haven’t come across for some time.’ W.L. Webb, Literary Editor, Guardian.
The advertised credentials of Stand Magazine are different. Stand’s website acknowledges no Arts Council support and no shareholders (assistance was given by the Northern Arts Association when the maga- zine moved from Leeds to Newcastle in 1965); it acknowledges the sup- port of the School of English at the University of Leeds and the Department of English at the University of Virginia, and describes its foundation on redundancy money from manual labour, and notes that it is a non-profit-making company registered with the Charity Commission in the UK.158
Stand first appeared in 1952 when Jon Silkin used his £5 redundancy money, received after trying to organise some of his fellow manual workers, to found a magazine which would ‘Stand’ against injustice and oppression, and ‘Stand’ for the role that the arts, poetry and fiction in particular, could and should play in that fight.
That anecdote is fleshed out in the linked section on Jon Silkin:
I began Stand in London. The magazine’s inception was greatly assisted by the American firm for which I was then working as a lavatory cleaner. One day, the foreman approached the five or six janitors and told us that he wanted us to work overtime, but at the flat rate. Then, as now, work was scarce, but I was so incensed by the foreman’s attitude that I tried to orga- nize a tiny union of janitors to protest against our treatment. This was 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 401
unsuccessful and in the event I took the can. My employers were so anxious to get rid of me that they gave me a day and a half’s holiday pay. Before I left, I went to the stationary department and, with the money, bought at a discount the paper for the magazine I intended to produce. Stand began as a mimeographed magazine with a printed cover. The first issue had twenty pages on light green paper and sold for 8d. Four hundred copies were pro- duced and distributed.
Stand’s survival when so many other literary journals, presses, festivals, and other disseminators of poetry have not, and its reliance on subscrip- tion and donation of time and money as funding for the arts is cut, is admirable.159 Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey shows the class divisions that remain in Britain’s cultural and creative industries. Dave O’Brien, Daniel Laurison, Andrew Miles, and Sam Friedman find these still ‘dominated by the privileged’, which ‘stands in stark contrast to dominant policy narratives of the CCIs as meritocratic’.160 They demon- strate that CCIs
show significant variation in their individual ‘openness’, although there is a general under-representation of those from working-class origins across the sector. This under-representation is especially pronounced in publishing and music, in contrast to, for example, craft. Moreover, even when those from working-class backgrounds enter certain CCIs, they face a “class origin pay gap” compared to those from privileged backgrounds. The paper discusses how class inequalities, as well as those related to gender and ethnicity, between individual CCIs point to occupational subcultures that resist aggre- gation into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s broader cate- gory of CCIs.
The replacement of private individual patronage by state subsidy is both limited and selective. The section on the history of Stand continues:
In its 50 plus years Stand has published early work by many writers who have gone on to become established figures—Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Michael Hamburger, Douglas Dunn, Jeffrey Wainwright and George MacBeth are just a few. The magazine has also played a major role in bring- ing the work of Russian and East European writers in translation to an English-speaking audience. The search for inventive or radical or experimental work goes on, as Stand appears quarterly, featuring the best in new writing, poetry, fiction and criticism. 402 S. BYRNE
Stand first appeared in London, then moved to Leeds when Jon Silkin was Gregory Fellow in Poetry, and where he studied for a degree in English. It moved again to Newcastle in 1965, returning to Leeds in 1999 after Jon Silkin’s death. Stand is an independent company, but works in close associa- tion with the School of English at the University of Leeds, and the School was proud to be able to host the 50th birthday celebrations for this distin- guished magazine, and to look forward to its future under a new edito- rial team.161
Stand’s mission, reasserted by Rodney Pybus in a piece following the death of Jon Silkin, is to provide ‘a forum for serious poetry and fiction for new as well as established writers, and a place where the unglamorous, the unfashionable, the oppositional, the innovative, the unEnglish, the radical voices might gain a hearing as well as the more conventional, acceptable and consensual’ voices. Silkin believed, Pybus writes, that ‘literature has a moral dimension as well as aesthetic qualities, that what we say […] can affect the thoughts and feelings of others’.162 Though located in Manchester, Carcanet and PN Review look south in terms of their early contributors and founders, most of whom were Oxbridge-educated. Of the poets mentioned as having early work pub- lished in Stand, four are self-declared of working-class origins, and two, if judged on the basis of parental occupation, from the middle or profes- sional class: George MacBeth’s father was a mining engineer and his mother the daughter of an antique dealer; Michael Hamburger’s father was a professor of paediatrics. MacBeth went to King Edward VII in Sheffield—a school known for its success in sending boys to Oxford or Cambridge—and New College, Oxford; Hamburger went to Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford; Wainwright, Smith, and Harrison were at Leeds, and Dunn at Hull. Only Hamburger attended a private (public) school, though others won scholarships to fee-paying schools or passed entrance examinations to ‘better’ or ‘posher’ places, and only Hamburger has no northern affiliation. Neil Roberts’s assertion that in Britain issues of class are also issues of region is perhaps the wrong way around.163 Though issues of regional culture and language are always issues of class, it is no longer true that ‘class becomes visible in poetry only when a working-class point of view is being articulated [that m]iddle-classness tends to be invisible in poetry’ because it is English poetry’s default voice. As has been seen, critics of the Movement have loudly and clearly labelled that poetry middle-class. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 403
Poetry wholly in dialect tends to be a minority interest in England, but poetry containing dialect words and that requires non-RP pronunciation for rhyme is the subject of criticism, of reviews, and of study, and sells. Whilst there is no ‘Leeds School’ of poets based on common styles, aims, or manifesto, there was a nexus of funding, outlets, and connec- tions which produced an environment conducive to poetry in the 1950s and after. Arnold Kettle, Geoffrey Hill, and Jon Silkin taught in the School of English; E.P. Thompson was a member of the History Department; Tony Harrison, James Simmons, Wole Sokinka, Ken Smith, and Jeffrey Wainwright were students. The Gregory Fellowships brought writers and artists-in-residence to the campus. Stand was marketed with enthusiasm, and the student magazine Poetry and Audience appeared regularly and had its own anthology with a foreword by Bonamy Dobrée, a prime mover in the reform of Leeds University in earlier years.164 The printing press of the university’s School of English was the starting place of Northern House, which produced several of the younger poets’ first pamphlet publications.
The Northern House publishing venture was established by Andrew Gurr and Jon Silkin in the Department of English Literature at Leeds in 1963. At Gurr’s suggestion, the Chair of English Literature, A. Norman Jeffares, had agreed to provide funding for the acquisition of a hand printing press for the use of bibliography students. Gurr acquired an old double demy Albion hand press, typefaces and other equipment for just over £250, and the press was set up in the basement of the University gym, at that time underneath the Students’ Union. Silkin first approached Gurr about the possibility of printing his Flower Poems using the press in early 1963; the idea soon expanded to producing a series of poems in pamphlet under the imprint Northern House Pamphlet Poets. Stand magazine would be used as a medium for publicity and access to poets; Silkin, Gurr and Ken Smith (already a Stand co-editor) would be the directors of Northern House. Subscription lists were circulated through Stand, the London Magazine and Encounter to raise funds for the production of the first pamphlets.165
There were two main aims:
1. To launch a series of poets in pamphlet, each pamphlet to contain approximately 10 to 12 poems by an individual poet, to cost around 2 shillings, and to be produced in editions of 2000 copies 404 S. BYRNE
2. To enlarge the audience for poetry and break down the idea that slim poetry volumes were ‘elitist’ productions designed only for the ‘initiated’
The first three Northern House pamphlets were published in May 1964: Jon Silkin’s Flower Poems, Ken Smith’s Eleven Poems, and Geoffrey Hill’s Preghiere. Tony Harrison’s first pamphlet collection,Earthwork s, was issued later that year, followed by Ted Walker’s Those Other Growths. Jon Glover and Jeffrey Wainwright became co-editors in the late 1960s; both had pamphlets of their own poetry published under the Northern House imprint, as did Gregory Fellow William Price Turner. When Andrew Gurr left the UK for New Zealand in 1969, Northern House relocated from Leeds to Newcastle, where, by that time, Jon Silkin was based. Pamphlets published following this move include the second edition of Tony Harrison’s Newcastle is Peru, and Silkin’s long poem Watersmeet (in conjunction with the Bay Press). In all, Northern House Pamphlet Poets issued over 30 publications between 1964 and 1995. Eagleton declared that Leeds had generated its own means of literary production in opposition to the dominant and was a prefiguring of ‘the productive forms and social relations of a future social formation’.166 Stand and Northern House are part of a wider impetus among small magazines, arts centres, independent publishers, and, more recently, websites such as New Writing North, however, an impetus to promote writing by authors who might be wary of the mainstream, metropolitan, and southern pub- lishing industry and who by virtue of accent and dialect may be considered as outside the middle-class southern literary coterie. ‘The north’ is not linguistically, geologically, or culturally monolithic, and its precise location (north of where?) is disputable and relative, until you hit the Shetland Islands. Not all of those poets have remained with regional publishers and not all remain in the north; not all northern-based publishers and periodi- cals restricted selection to the immediate region. Nonetheless, to be a northern and working-class poet was to an extent a badge of identity, however disrupted, and unity, however fractured, and of opposition. ‘It is possible […] to regard Northern society as a whole as an anti-structure with regard to the dominant values of politics, law and history as upheld in the South’.167 Barry Tebb (b.1942) publishes his work himself, under the imprint Sixties Press, marking his association with the Revival movement against the mainstream and metropolitan, though his work is less avant-garde or 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 405 experimental than, for example, Barry MacSweeney, and less influenced by Gainsberg or Black Mountain poetry than, for example, Jim Burns (b.1936).168 Tebb was involved with the Leeds University and Gregory Fellows’ initiatives, though he studied at Leeds training college. He dis- avows a working-class background on the basis that he didn’t have aunties and uncles in Leeds,169 perhaps a swipe at conventional portrays of urban working-class extended families, as elsewhere in his work this is contra- dicted. His poetry shows its affiliations with Leeds throughout, and with the Leeds poets occasionally, referencing Harrison both directly:
Tony Harrison, you write hard While I write soft about Our common Leeds; we share A hatred of all grammar schools. You see Luddite blood while I dream of Margaret’s first Menstruation; you see the Aire As slime, to me it was the Halcyon’s nesting ground.170 and indirectly:
I want a poetry Bitten back from the tongue Or spat like phlegm Into the fire back.171
Another northern stronghold is the thirteenth-century Mordern Tower on Back Stowell Street on the West walls of Newcastle upon Tyne. Acquired by Connie and Tom Pickard in 1964, it became a locus of poetry in the north of England. The first reading in its small upper room was by a poet and songwriter, Pete Brown, in June 1964, and Basil Bunting, on 22 December 1965, gave the first reading from Briggflatts in the tower’s turret room. In 1990, an anthology celebrating 25 years of readings in the tower was published by Bloodaxe Books, another Newcastle institution.172 For some years Mordern Tower received funding from the Arts Council of England, but since this ended in 2005. The list of poets who have given readings there includes (among many others) Fleur Adcock, Simon Armitage, George Barker, Angela Carter, Fred D’Aguiar, Nell Dunn, Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein, Lavinia Greenlaw, Allen Ginsberg, 406 S. BYRNE
Michael Hamburger, Ian Hamilton, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Jackie Kay, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochead, Christopher Logue, George MacBeth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Edwin Morgan, Tom Paulin, Tom Pickard, Tom Raworth, James Simmons, Ken Smith, and Hugo Williams. The association between Mordern Tower and Bloodaxe Books is unsur- prising, as Bloodaxe has been another northern powerhouse, identifying, encouraging, and publishing poetry from its Newcastle (now Hexham) base since it was founded by Neil Astley in 1978. Named for the last king of an independent Northumbria, Bloodaxe notes on its website that Erik Bloodaxe could be seen as a patron of poetry; he forced the captured scop Egil to compose a praise poem overnight on pain of death, and, pleased with the result, spared Egil’s life.173 Though Bloodaxe promotes poetry from the north in anthologies such as Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England,174 its remit is catholic and international. It is one of the few (initially small) independent presses to survive cuts to grants, fall- ing poetry sales in the 1980s and 1990s, the Net Book Agreement, and the competition from internet sales. The Northern Poetry Library, established in 1968, celebrated its 50th anniversary by publishing online a series of poems by 50 poets on the theme of ‘North’ in a specially developed form, the 821.175 This, named for the Dewey Decimal classification for English poetry, will consist of three stanzas of 11 lines each which employ the volta. Ten sets of stanzas will constitute a canto. The poems are about the northern countryside; love, of person and place; memory; nostalgia. Class appears only in post- card memories: the habits of grandfathers, uncles and aunts, or mothers; abandoned mines; and memories of now-gentrified terraced houses.
Inside and Out Unlike Harrison’s School of Eloquence sonnets, which look back on a lan- guage and culture of [uz] that implicitly was once inhabited by the poetic ‘I’, the poems of Terry Street describe an urban, English working-class culture which the ‘I’ has not shared.176 That area of Hull might function as a ‘surrogate’ for Dunn’s home,177 but only in some respects, in others it is unfamiliar terrain in which the narrator is an outsider, and that gives the collection much of its power. Bernard O’Donoghue refers to the ‘photo- graphic over-objectivity’ of the poems and regards the volume as unusual: ‘it is hard to think of another such close focus on a parish which is not the 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 407 writer’s native affiliation’.178 In a poem about the new edition of Terry Street with photographs by Robert Whittaker, more than 30 years after having lived there, Dunn references his childhood working-class creden- tials: bathing in a tin bath in the living room; walking behind a hand- plough.179 He acknowledges the distance between the self depicted in that collection and the locals of Terry Street. ‘Outsider, incomer, not on first- name terms with my neighbours.’ The hardest understanding is
never to have understood Entirely those among whom I lived and, conversely, the Terry Street neighbours did not understand the poet, ‘as if a true exchange was not permitted’. The younger poet’s obsession with outside lavatories and to washing in a tin bath is described as a self- conscious awareness of this as incongruous, currently defamiliarised, and as a trope:
Lawrentian, truly working class! tin bath. (p. 70)
Clive James’s analogy of a cameraman ‘parked up a tree with his head dis- guised as a coconut’ getting the shots and getting out, is inadequate.180 The Terry Street narrator is a stranger to this area and this life, but his background has enough commonalities with them to make the represen- tation neither sentimental nor patronising. By placing his younger self in v., Harrison claims a continued affiliation with working-class culture, but nonetheless his narrative persona separates himself by virtue of his acquired culture. The education and experiences that have divided him from his roots remain in tension with his protests at the exclusion of the working classes from high culture. Edwin Morgan’s Instamatic Poems eschew allusion, meditation, exposi- tion, affect, and conclusion for tableaux. They would probably be Instagram poems now. The first ‘Glasgow 5 March 1971’ poem docu- ments a couple pushed through a plate-glass window on a ‘sharp clear night/in Sauchiehall Street’ whilst motorists drive past, eyes firmly on the road.181 The second captures the moment when a knife has just missed a magistrate in the Central Police Court, and the man in the dock still has his arm outflung. All that is remarkable is ‘the striking absence of conster- nation’.182 The contrast between these snapshots and the next is not pointed, simply the wonder and amazement of four children in Nice gaz- 408 S. BYRNE ing at white snow and black sea is exhibited.183 Though like the street scenes of Terry Street they observe from outside and neither name nor characterise the people described, they are less voyeuristic by virtue of the absence of a narrator who is present yet not part of the locale. In contrast, the poetry of Tom Pickard (b.1946) has a speaking, engaged narrator writing from within the culture of which he writes. That culture is neither romanticised nor deplored. Like Jon Silkin and MacSweeney, he used unemployment to educate himself and develop his poetry. Whereas a leisured poet might observe agricultural labour from an elevated position in an eighteenth-century pastoral, Pickard’s out-of-work narrators observe industrial labour. In ‘Unemployed’
A building site next to a factory [….] The foreman is a big fat cunt and doesn’t need labourers.184
In ‘Stowell Street Corporation Yard’
workers are in nineteenth-century conditions, surroundings, looks, and poses.185
Foremen are
proud to be humbled by their superiors,’
Their men work amongst the rubbish in lines
working ‘with their hands and backs’ among ‘shit we put in our bins’ just ‘as many generations of peasants in fields worked before them’. MacSweeney’s Ranter186 tackles the problem of perspective, of whether there must be a choice between the personal and the public, the historical and the contemporary, inside and outside; by having a protean narrator running through non-linear space and time, adopting and shedding personae serially but also simultaneously. Ranter speaks as a non-conformist preacher, groups of radicals and strikers, a wolf, a bird, a worker, con- demned men, the pagan Irish king cursed by a Christian cleric in the Buile Suibhne, and, Luke Roberts suggests, IRA prisoners in Long Kesh,187 the outcast, marginalised and dispossessed. He refers to Hadrian, Bede, Halfden, Cuthbert, and ‘Finbar’, seen by Roberts as representing the poet 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 409 himself.188 Perhaps influenced by Eliot as well as Basil Bunting, the poem has the energy of the Poetry Revival free verse but more concentrated themes. Sharing the leap between consciousnesses with such poems as Ken Smith’s Fox Running, Ranter manages to have more bite than most, partly because of the accumulation of suffering, and partly from the acces- sibility. The chains of gerunds and absence of connectives make the pace fast, as do the characters and place names that whizz past, but Ranter’s pursuit (of or by or both) is not smooth.
Ranter loping running retrieving motoring chasing her with a cloakclasp sniffing her trail loving wanting eyes on any horizon but this blind spot leaping the fence of his enclosure eyes down in open fields stunned with blood189
Mimesis of regular movement (‘Ranter running/ loping […] motoring chasing’) is broken as though Ranter stumbles, falters, looks back: ‘Her with a cloakclasp’ or faces an obstacle. In places Ranter stops, looks, and exclaims, nowhere so to the point as:
Dear God what kind of kingdom
People standing in the fields all day in the rain doing nothing leaning on sticks glaring, miserable
resentment filling their chapped bodies
afraid of everyone and themselves190 410 S. BYRNE
Ranter sees no consequent activism, no revolution; the ‘wolfmuscles’ that are flexed are not aimed at the masters but turned to violent sex. The poet looking back on working-class origins or ventriloquising voices of the marginalised is likely to be criticised for nostalgia, voyeurism, slumming, or inauthenticity. Rhyme-words apart, poetry on the page can lose its accent, and phonetic spelling can miss the excluding class it is aimed at and hit only the excluded. There are exceptions, of course. Leonard’s ‘Six O’Clock News’ has become required reading in schools, as has ‘Them & [uz]’, both presented in teaching anthologies with glosses. Are class-migrant poets whose accents and lexicon have changed uz or them? Does it matter? Does Carol Ann Duffy being DBE FRSL, HonFBA, HonFRSE; Douglas Dunn being OBE; and Don Paterson being OBE, FRSL, FRSE mean that they are as ‘establishment’ as Sir Andrew Motion? Is it a problem that Harrison’s persona goes from drinking Newcastle Brown in ‘Newcastle is Peru’ to Château Lafitte and Château Neuf du Pape in ‘Social Mobility’ (THCP, p. 117) and resents being served California Chablis when flying Y-class? THCP( , p. 285) Must writers stay working-class to write about inequality? Have we moved on from Thompson finding Duck’s poetry ‘downhill all the way’ after Duck ceased to work as a thresher?191 Is a review on Proletarian Poetry.com an impri- matur for the depiction of real working-class culture, whatever that is?192 Do we seem to want regional and class ‘authenticity’, to ‘hear’ the ‘real’ counter-cultural, oppositional, voice? As a side point, performance poetry is frequently slammed, as that of several young women poets was by Rebecca Watts in PN Review.193 As discussed in the chapter on eighteenth- century poetry, Easthope argues that the latent ideology of the iambic pentameter line itself makes the poet who uses it an agent of the bourgeois illusion of the autonomous self.194 Easthope further argues that pentameter is especially suited to RP because it requires a particular number of syllables to the line and therefore prevents elision, ‘making transition at word junctures difficult’. An example given is from Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’. ‘When Ajax strives, some Rocks’ vast Weight to throw’ (1. 70).
In three places (‘Ajax-strives’, ‘strives-some’, ‘weight-to’) similar sounds end one word and begin the next: Normally (that is, in casual discourse), there would be no problem; the first of the similar sounds would be omitted by a variety of elision … it might sound something like, ‘When Ajak’strive’ some Rock’s vast Weigh’to throw.195 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 411
This is to identify RP with careful or exaggerated pronunciation, to over- look elision and silent phonemes present in RP and heightened RP, but does make an important point in relation to regional dialects and socio- lects in which these features are more apparent. This does not mean that poetry cannot be pronounced in ways other than RP, but that iambic pentameter may encourage a slower, more careful, or less natural reading from speakers with accents other than RP, except in the case of elisions made evident typographically, as in some of Harrison’s poems. Nor does this mean that RP and Standard English speakers alone can write in iambic pentameter; much dialect and folk poetry is iambic. The extent to which that kind of poetry has been considered of less value, as ‘popular’ rather than ‘high’ culture, is another matter. Whilst all metre is linear, ‘an orga- nization along the line closing at the line boundary’, Easthope sees pen- tameter as linear ‘to a special degree’ because it ‘points horizontally along the syntagmatic chain […] both within the line and across lines’, running together and unifying subject matter and meaning.196 Each pentameter line has a separate identity and gives a powerful voice to syntax, encourag- ing and promoting coherence in the subject. Whereas the soliloquising voice ‘tends to be over-personal’, a ‘powerful and passionate syntax’ enforced by traditional metres’ can indicate ‘impersonal meditation [….] syntagmatic closure promoted by the pentameter can approximate to a poise and self-consistency that seems absolute’.197 Iambic pentameter, eliding metricality ‘in favour of “the prosody of natural speech”’ identifies ‘the speaking of a poem with the speaking of a represented speaker or a narrator; it invites the reader into a position of imaginary identification with this single voice, this represented presence’. It ostends both authority and authenticity.198 The use of conventional forms such as iambic pentameter by poets such as Harrison and Dunn distinguished their respective early poetics from those of the Revival poets and others of the 1960s and 1970s, whose inno- vation and radicalism, influenced by the American poets directly or via Jeremy Prynne (b.1936), was mostly manifested in fractured free verse. Dunn sometimes uses rhyme and often uses or approximates blank verse; Harrison almost invariably uses rhyme and iambic or trochaic feet. In ten- sion with these, however, are the demotic lexicon, font changes, ellipses, words broken across lines, and occasional requirement of Northern pro- nunciation and the tendency for the iambic line to be overlain by four strong stresses. In ‘The Rhubarbarians’ (THCP, p. 123) the lines 412 S. BYRNE
Horsfall of Ottiwells, if the bugger could, d’ve liked to (exact words recorded) ride. (ll. 6–7) encourage elision (‘d’ve liked’) and disrupt the smooth flow of the abstract system of iambic stress with an insistence on intonation through parentheses.
u / u d’ve liked to anticipates
/ ride
But
u / / u / u (exact words recorded) wrong-foots the metre with a suggestion of a caesura and an unstressed syllable followed by a syllable likely to be stressed less strongly than the anticipated ‘ride’. The opening of ‘Them & [uz]’ I (THCP, p. 133) dis- rupts not only the hierarchical binaries of Greek philosophy and music hall, articulacy and inarticulacy, high and low culture but also the pentam- eter line. ‘αιαι, ay, ay!’ employs the differentiation by length of Greek poetry in its first two syllables, following this with a quick-fire spondee of demotic English, so that rather than
u / u / αιαι, ay, ay! the line can be seen as
- -- / / αιαι, ay, ay!
Reinforcing in the chosen rhetorician’s name the point that this is about the demos, the line continues: 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 413
/ u u u / u u … stutterer Demosthenes
Four strong stresses, which continue:
/ u u / u u / u / gob full of pebbles outshouting seas. (ll. 1–2)
The sense intonation of speech also works against as well as with the abstract system of metre in the dialogue.
‘We say [∧s] not [uz], T.W.!’ (l. 13)199 Although this is metrically regular, / u / u / u / when spoken, it would receive additional stress on [∧s] and uz]. Similarly, the teacher himself emphasising ‘correct’ enunciation clearly by volume and duration disrupts stress as the organising principle of the line in his final word, which depends for emphasis as much upon length as upon weight. ‘E-nun-ci-ate!’ (l. 16) The rhyme scheme of Dunn’s ‘Class Photograph’200 aabccb, containing parallel but different couplets and separating the two couplets but empha- sising the closure of each stanza, suits the development of ideas in self- contained sections: We were … I remember … the photograph … the present. The poem’s starting point is an image, children in uniform frozen in time, and a series of media images follows: the filmBattle of the River Plate; the song ‘Rock Around the Clock’; the advertisements for Ovaltine and Start-Rite shoes (ll. 8–13). These oppose an icon of teen culture and the demotic of pop songs contemporary with the photograph to the syn- thetic RP, sanitised warfare and empire values promoted by propaganda films, and the middle-class tweeness of the Ovaltineys. The latter, a chil- dren’s club established in 1935 to promote an instant hot drink, had a radio programme, membership badge, official rule book, comic book, and a theme song which was relaunched several times to exploit nostalgia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. (Baudrillard would have a field day.) That song began with a line echoed in the opening of the poem: ‘We are the Ovaltineys, little girls and boys’.201 The New Elizabethans is an identity as outmoded and as manufactured as the Ovaltineys. Start-rite shoes now include trainers, loafers, and ankle boots in their range for children but for 414 S. BYRNE an older generation would conjure an image of neat, conventional, sensi- ble round-toed T-bar sandals and lace-ups, as worn by middle-class chil- dren, particularly as advertisements from the 1930s were still used in the 1950s.202 The ambiguity of ‘class’ in the title is not evident until the clos- ing lines, which bless a political system and a service which ostensibly at least are egalitarian, and one principle of encouraging protest against the inegalitarian:
God bless Democracy, dissent and the NHS Which underpins our civic decency. (ll. 22–24)
Harrison uses iambic and trochaic tetrameter couplets for his references to the ‘New Elizabethan’ era and its imagined aftermath, in a pair of anti- monarchist poems: ‘A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of Charles III’, (THCP, pp. 321–323), ‘Deathwatch Dancethon’ (THCP, pp. 324–328), and abab catalectic and hypercatalectic pentameter quatrains for ‘Laureate’s Block’ (THCP, pp. 329–332). Whereas earlier long poems such as ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (THCP, pp. 220–223) and ‘Newcastle is Peru’ (THCP, pp. 64–69) achieve energetic impetus through the repetitive structure of metre and rhyme, the irregularities of the later poems some- times produces strained articulation: ‘I’m appalled to see newspapers use my name’ ‘Laureate’s Block’ (l. 1) and the rhymes occasionally grate:
While she ran the gauntlet of gut-curdling guile child murder, mayhem, lust for monarchy I walked by the swollen Avon for a while. The plastic bag with Gray in banged my knee. (ll. 29–32)
A better comparison for Dunn’s poem might be Harrison’s ‘Turns’, a Meredithian sonnet whose divisions of two sextets and a quatrain rhymed ababcd cdeffe ghgh further divides the poem into quatrains (THCP, p. 162). The politics of Dunn’s poem centre on the filtering of reality through film, music, and advertising; Harrison’s centre on a material object, the flat cap, metonymic of working-class northern masculinity. Whereas Dunn’s narrator affirms the persistence of ‘civic decency’, Harrison’s accuses the upper classes of breaking his father and accuses himself of being like a kerbside busker, peddling to that class, the buyers of poetry. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 415
I’m opening my trap to busk the class that broke him for the pence that splash like brackish tears into our cap. (ll. 14–16)
Questions of authenticity and the right to represent are unanswered, but the tensions they create continue.
Conclusion The conclusion to this survey is in some ways, plus ça change. We have not achieved any kind of Utopian classless or equal society as imagined by the Chartists. Class divisions still exist in Britain, and class is still considered a factor in the publication and reception of poetry, so it is still the subject of poetry. Class is bound up with social factors such as ethnicity and gender to which this study could not have done justice, and with dialect, literacy, and education, which have been touched on. Much more could be said and will be said about many of the poets discussed here and in the context of those factors. Things have moved on since 1381: British society no longer has a peasant and serf class, though human trafficking and modern slavery exist; no one is likely to publish a poem about the plebs snorting and snuffling like pigs, though tabloid headlines about ‘benefit scroungers’ and immigrants persist; there is free education for all, though private school pupils often perform better than those from state schools; the BBC has announcers who speak with regional accents, but there remains a lin- gering feeling that RP and Standard English are the gold standard from which other accents and dialects diverge; anyone can submit poetry for publication, though many poetry presses and lists have closed and poetry is still unlikely to furnish the poet with a living. The important thing is that poets continue to intervene in debates, to dramatise conflicts, and intro- duce heteroglossic discourse and difficult questions into public poetic statements. To end, it is worth giving an example of a recently published young poet who celebrates a working-class background and region, Liz Berry. Like Helen Mort, Berry shows that such work is no longer restricted to small presses, but can be taken on by mainstream publishing houses. Berry’s first collection (following the chapbook, The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls (Luton: Tall Lighthouse, 2010), Black Country,203 celebrates the West Midlands people, places, and language in dramatic monologues, narratives, and occasional poems. The dialect is described as ‘babble never caught by ink or book’ (‘The Sea of Talk’ p. 48) but is caught in poems 416 S. BYRNE such as ‘Homing’: ‘vowels ferrous as nails, consonants / you could lick the coal from’ (p. 4). There are closed pits and factories, but also vibrant cher- ished urban and rural landscapes. Like Black Torch, Berry’s poems make blackness literal and metaphorical, but the black of the Black Country is both industrial and natural, earthy and transcendent. The voice of ‘Bird’ is ‘no longer words but ‘song black upon black’ (p. 2). Blackness is multiva- lent as pigeons’ feathers particularly in ‘Birmingham Roller’ (p. 3) and ‘Christmas Eve’ (pp. 59–60), in which it becomes the backdrop for light and white. ‘Christmas Eve’, a miniature Under Milk Wood, travels across the Black Country towns, turning sleet to tinsel, boy racers in white Novas to comets, then, as the snow sets in, moving from vignette to vignette, the everyday: pubs; tower blocks, terraces; drunks, men laid-off work, women putting children to bed or watching soap operas; the cherished. Poems in English representing issues of class can still attain publication in the twenty-first century. Many of these are anecdotal of personal experi- ence, some looking back as though class were a different country from which we have moved on, and some as though issues of class were as simple as ‘poor working-class good, posh bad’. But some poets do con- tinue to deal in both the personal and the public, and to make the personal public. Harrison in particular appropriates to himself the role of public statesman and interventionist, and uses a dialectical method to show dif- ferent sides of class issues and to arrive at a synthesis, primarily in his film poems which cannot be discussed here.
Notes 1. Alvarez, op. cit., p. 3. 2. Mike Ellison, ‘Rock-Style Stardom Beckons as a New Generation of Poets Quits Attic for the Limelight’, Guardian (13 January 1994), 2. 3. The project was launched in 1986. Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, eds, Poems on the Underground (London: Cassell, 1992). 4. Peter Forbes, ‘The Reviewer’, Poetry Review 84.4 (Winter 1994/5), 3. 5. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940, Longman Literature in English Series (Harlow: Longman, 1993). 6. Blake Morrison, ‘The Filial Art: A Reading of Contemporary British Poetry’, Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987), 179–217. 7. Valerie Avery, London Morning (London: W. Kimber, 1964), London Shadows (London: W. Kimber, 1981), and London Spring (London: W. Kimber, 1982). Avery records the way in which she began to imitate 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 417
the pronunciation of a school teacher, believing it to be the right way, in London Morning, p. 119. 8. David Kennedy, New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980– 94 (Bridgend, Glamorgan: Seren, 1996), p. 16. 9. Richard D. Altick, ‘The Sociology of Authorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800–1935’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962), 389–404 (393–394). 10. Altick, op. cit., 394–395. 11. Altick, op. cit., 402. 12. Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford: Basil Backwell, 1971), pp. 138–139. 13. Bradbury, op. cit., pp. 140–141. 14. Brian Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform, 1920–1940 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), pp. 196–224. 15. Brian Simon, ‘The 1944 Education Act: A Conservative measure?’ History of Education 15.1 (1986), 31–43 (35) and Simon, Politics of Educational Reform, pp. 267–268. 16. Fred Clarke, Education and Social Change: An English Interpretation (London: Sheldon Press, 1940), pp. 37–38; p. 57. Clarke’s emphasis. 17. Simon, ‘1944 Education Act’, 33. 18. T.C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines: Democracy and the Public Schools (London: Robert Hale, 1940), p. 274. 19. E.C. Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion Since 1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 460–462. 20. Simon, op. cit., pp. 36–43. 21. Simon, op. cit., p. 36. 22. Simon, op. cit., pp. 36–37. 23. Simon, op. cit., p. 43. 24. See Ken Jones, Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 24–25. 25. Ken Worpole quotes from Frances Stevens, The Living Tradition: The Social and Educational Assumptions of the Grammar School (London: Hutchinson, 1960) in ‘Scholarship Boy: The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, New Left Review I/153 (September–October 1985), in Neil Astley, ed., Tony Harrison, Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991, pp. 61–74 (66). 26. Frances Stevens, The New Inheritors (London: Hutchinson Education, 1970), p. vii. 27. Stevens, op. cit., p. 5. 28. Stevens, op. cit., p. 4. 29. Stevens, op. cit., p. 7. 418 S. BYRNE
30. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (1957); rprt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), pp. 242–246. 31. Hoggart, op. cit., p. 243. 32. Hoggart, op. cit., p. 244. 33. Eliot, op. cit., p. 509. 34. Worpole, op. cit., p. 63. 35. Worpole, op. cit., p. 74. 36. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 120. 37. Ibid. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941). Bradbury’s note and emphasis. 38. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 121. 39. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 122. 40. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 123. 41. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 124. 42. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 125. 43. Bradbury, op. cit., p. 126. 44. Ibid. 45. Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), p. 143. 46. Douglas Dunn in conversation with Gerry Cambridge, The Dark Horse 8 (Autumn 1999), 20–31 (27). 47. Ibid. 48. Douglas Dunn, ‘Gardeners: England, Loamshire, 1789 A gardener speaks, in the grounds of a great house, to his Lordship’, Barbarians DDNSP, pp. 49–50. 49. James Keery, ‘The Zone of Thermal Death’, Jacket 30 (July 2006). http://www.jacketmagazine.com/30/keery-zone.html. 50. Hoggart’s title for the section in which the essay ‘Scholarship Boy’ appears is ‘Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and Anxious’, op. cit., pp. 241–263. 51. The ‘middle generation’ is a term used by Douglas Dunn to include him- self, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, and other writers born in the 1930s and 1940s. See Douglas Dunn, ‘The Topical Muse’, The Kenneth Allott Lecture (1990), extract reprinted as ‘Formal Strategies in Tony Harrison’s Poetry’ in Neil Astley, ed., Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991), pp. 129–132. 52. Interview by W.N. Herbert, Verse 7.3 (Winter 1990), 89–96 (90). Quoted in Kennedy, New Relations, p. 19. 53. Initially, like Harrison, from the West Riding, as a child Hughes moved with his family to Mexborough, now part of the more recently designated South Yorkshire. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 419
54. Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, 2nd edn (London: William Collins, 2016), p. 49. 55. Bate, op. cit., pp. 53–54. 56. Letter to John, Nancy, Angela, and Francis Fisher, 31 July 1960, in Christopher Reid, ed., Letters of Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), pp. 166–167 (166). 57. Hughes, letter to Keith Sagar, in Reid, op. cit., pp. 718–726 (722). 58. Steve Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 114. 59. Ely, op. cit., p. 111. 60. Ely, op. cit., pp. 52–53. 61. Hughes, letter to Aurelia and Warren Plath (December 1956) [Reid’s dating] in Reid, op. cit., pp. 89–90. 62. Hughes, letter to Aurelia and Warren Plath (21 January 1957) in Reid, op. cit., pp. 91–3 (91). 63. Paul Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 29. Hughes gives the date of the Act as 1948, op. cit., p. 453. 64. Bate, op. cit., p. 78. 65. Interviewed by Angela Lambert, ‘The hero of his own unrhymed triplets: Craig Raine is happy, successful, doesn’t believe in modesty and got £60,000 for his new book. Not bad for a poet’, Independent (30 August 1994), 23. 66. In a later interview in The Guardian he refers to Sons and Lovers as ‘a kind of Bible’ to her. Quoted in Nicholas Wroe, ‘A life in writing: Craig Raine’, Guardian (17 October 2009), 12. 67. Interviewed by Steve Pratt, ‘Fate plays an electrifying hand’, The Northern Echo (28 October 2002), 11. 68. See interview by Wroe, op. cit., p. 12. 69. In 1967 schools agreed ‘to forgo fees in exchange of a capitation grant from the state. In addition, physical access to post-primary schools was eased by the simultaneous introduction of free school transport’. Richard Breen and Christopher T. Whelan, Social Mobility and Social Class in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), p. 98. 70. See A. Dale Tussing’s report on Irish Educational Expenditures: Past, Present and Future (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 1978) cited in Breen and Whelan, op. cit., p. 101. 71. See, for example, Joe Horgan, ‘To say that there is no class structure in Ireland is rubbish – just look at O’Driscoll and Keane’, The Irish Post (29 July 2013). http://irishpost.co.uk/its-time-to-face-the-facts-about-ire- lands-classless-society/ and Carl O’Brien and Deirdre Falvey, ‘Feeder schools: Social class still drives school league tables’, The Irish Times (3 December 2015). http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/feeder- 420 S. BYRNE
schools-social-class-still-drives-school-league-tables-1.2451880. Schools’ social class is determined in these articles by location in areas judged to be more or less affluent. 72. Selina McCoy, Emer Smyth, Dorothy Watson, and Merike Darmody, Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 2014), p. xi. 73. Adrian E. Raftery and Michael Hout, ‘Maximally Maintained Inequality: Expansion, Reform and Opportunity in Irish Education, 1921–1975’, Sociology of Education 66.1 (January 1993), 41–62, quoted in Breen and Whelan, op. cit., p. 101. 74. See Seamus Heaney, ‘Mossbawn’ (1980), in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), pp. 3–13 (8). 75. Heaney, op. cit., pp. 10–12. 76. Heaney, op. cit., pp. 11–12. 77. Ibid. 78. Heaney, op. cit., p. 13. 79. Heaney, ‘Learning from Eliot’, The Government of the Tongue (1988), op. cit., pp. 26–38 (26). 80. Heaney, op. cit., p. 28. 81. Hoggart, op. cit., pp. 245–246. 82. David Kennedy, ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The staging of antithetical masculine styles in the poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’, Textual Practice 14.1 (2000), 115–136 (117). 83. Edna Longley, ‘“When Did You Last See Your Father?”: Perceptions of the Past in Northern Irish Writing 1965–1985’ in Michael Kenneally, ed., Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature (1988); rprnt in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), pp. 150–172 (152). 84. Tom Leonard, ‘Fathers and Sons’, Intimate Voices: Selected Work, 1965– 1983 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press, 1984); rprnt in Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965–2009 (Exbourne, Devon: Etruscan Books, 2009), p. 54. 85. Morrison, op. cit., p. 179. 86. Morrison, op. cit., p. 184. 87. Morrison, op. cit., p. 181. 88. Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940, p. 154. 89. Hoggart, op. cit., p. 247. 90. Kennedy, ‘“What does the fairy DO?”’, pp. 115–116. 91. Morrison, op. cit., p. 183. 92. Morrison, op. cit., p. 191. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 421
93. David Marcus, ed., Irish Poets, 1924–1974 (London: Pan Books, 1975), p. 16, quoted in Longley, Living Stream, pp. 150–172 (152). 94. ‘Interview by Nigel Farndale, ‘Seamus Famous’, The Telegraph (5 April 2001). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4722682/Seamus-Famous. html. 95. Heaney, ‘Mossbawn’, op. cit., p. 7. 96. The version of this poem in OG is different from that in the Station Island volume. 97. See the interview by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews in Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 13–27 (13–15) in which Carson states that the representations of Mr Carson in works such as The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997) are more fictional than biographical (p. 14). 98. Carson, op. cit., p. 116. 99. Interview by Aida Edemariam, ‘A life in poetry: Ciaran Carson’, Guardian (17 January 2009). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/ 17/poetry-ciaran-carson-belfast-ireland. 100. Otherwise known as the Congregation of the Mission, founded in France by St Vincent de Paul in the early seventeenth century. An initial mission to Ireland in 1646 failed, but subsequent attempts established the order and its schools. The order’s mission is stated on their website: ‘We as Vincentians try to reach out to the poor wherever we find them and in whatever way we can’. http://vincentians.ie/our-work/. The website adds that the ‘Irish Vincentans more so than any other province have long emphasised the importance of education of the Catholic people’. http:// vincentians.ie/our-work/education/. 101. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 101. 102. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Review: Magic Mushrooms’, Poetry Review 73.4 (January 1984), 53–55 (53). 103. Interview by Alan Jenkins, ‘Reclaiming Poetry’, Sunday Times (14 December 1986). 104. Muldoon describes his early life in ‘A tight wee place in Armagh’, Fortnight 206 (July–August, 1984), 19, 23. 105. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 23. 106. Robert Potts, ‘The Poet at Play’, Guardian (12 May 2001), https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/12/poetry.artsand humanities. 107. The latter point is made by Edna Longley, who adds that organisations such as Unionist parties sometimes refer to themselves as families, op. cit., p. 152. 108. Irish tales of heroes’ quests for the Otherworld, usually in sea voyages. 422 S. BYRNE
109. Peter Mackay, ‘Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry and Romanticism’ in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 297–310 (303). 110. O’Donoghue, op. cit., p. 54. 111. Harrison associates the beat of iambs and trochees with the heart-beat, ‘with the sexual instinct, with all those physical rhythms’. John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison’, in Neil Astley, op. cit., pp. 227–246 (236). 112. Alan Brownjohn, ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, Encounter 70.3 (March 1979), 64. 113. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 133. 114. Kennedy, op. cit., pp. 117–118. Citing Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 115. Bentley, op. cit., p. 15. 116. Bentley, op. cit., p. 29. 117. James Kirkup, ‘To the Ancestral North’, The Descent into the Cave and Other Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 20. 118. Seamus Heaney, ‘North’, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). 119. Heaney, ‘Belderg’, North, pp. 13–14. 120. Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (London: Fulcrum, 1966). 121. Ian Duhig, ‘Ken’s Videos – Seahouses’, The Lammas Hireling (London: Picador, 2003), p. 30. 122. See, for example, Hughes, letter to Aurelia and Warren Plath (22 August 1960) in Reid, op. cit., pp. 168–170 (69). 123. Ted Hughes, Letter to Nick Gammage (15 March 1991) in Reid, op. cit., pp. 592–594 (593). 124. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Ted Hughes: War Poet’, The Antioch Review 71.1 (Winter 2013), 30–39 (30). 125. Hughes, letter to Gammage (15 March 1991) in Reid, op. cit., p. 593. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. A letter about a conference paper by Gammage is both admiring of Graves and judiciously critical. Hughes, letter to Nick Gammage (7 April 1995) in Reid, op. cit., pp. 679–681. 130. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975); rprt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 322. 131. Ted Hughes, ‘The Rock’, The Listener 70 (19 September 1963), 421– 443 (423). 132. Meyers, op. cit., p. 31. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 423
133. Hughes, ‘The Rock’, p. 423. 134. Barry MacSweeney, Black Torch (London: New London Pride Editions, 1978). 135. Helen Mort, Division Street (London Chatto and Windus, 1984), pp. 16–23. 136. Luke Spencer, The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 92. 137. Corcoran, op. cit., p. 218. 138. The poem references the project of inner-city revitalisation through slum clearances and the provision of modern civic centres, which led to the destruction of much of Georgian and Victorian Newcastle, and ended with the imprisonment of T. Dan Smith and John Paulson for corruption. 139. First published in A Free Translation (Edinburgh: The Salamander Press, 1981), pp. 22–25. 140. See Ann Skea, ‘Regeneration in Remains of Elmet’ in Keith Sagar, ed., The Challenge of Ted Hughes (London: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 116–128. 141. See, for example, ‘Revenge Fable’ (Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, 1970, THCP, pp. 244–245). 142. The importance to Mrs Hughes of her son’s success is mentioned in let- ters such as that to his brother Gerald and Gerald’s family of May 1957. In Reid, op. cit., pp. 97–98 (98). 143. Heaney interviewed in Viewpoints, op. cit., p. 60. 144. Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, op. cit., p. 17. 145. Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth- Century Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 144. 146. David Miller and Richard Price, British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’. London: British Library, 2006, p. xii. 147. See Barry MacSweeney, ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960–75’, in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, eds, New British Poetries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 15–50. 148. See Ken Edwards, Writing and Commodities, Association of Little Presses Catalogue 1985 (London: ALP, 1985), n.p. 149. Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer, eds, insert to Migrant Magazine 1 (July 1959). 150. Juha Virtanan, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980: Event and Effect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 48. 151. Michael Horovitz, ed., Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 424 S. BYRNE
152. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 524. 153. See Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing, ALP The First 22 ½ Years (London: The Association of Little Presses, 1988). 154. Griffiths and Cobbing, op. cit., p. 23. 155. Barry MacSweeney, ‘Revival’, op. cit., p. 40. 156. http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showinfo=ip020. 157. http://www.pnreview.co.uk/about.shtml. 158. Stand, http://www.standmagazine.org/about-us. 159. Stand acknowledges the support of the School of English at the University of Leeds, the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the School of the Arts at the University of Bolton, stating. that staff from these have given their time to write and edit the journal. http://www.standmagazine.org/welcome. 160. Dave O’Brien, Daniel Laurison, Andrew Miles, and Sam Friedman, ‘Are the creative industries meritocratic? An analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey’, Cultural Trends 25 (2016), 116–131. Abstract: https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2016.1170943. 161. Stand, op. cit. 162. Rodney Pybus, ‘Jon Silkin 1930–1997’, Stand 39: 2 (Spring 1998), 5. 163. Neil Roberts, ‘Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’ in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215– 229 (215). 164. Poetry and Audience 1953–60: An Anthology (Leeds: Leeds University, 1961). The poems were selected by A.R. Mortimer and the editorial board of the magazine. 165. Andrew Gurr and Jon Silkin, Northern House Pamphlet Poets publicity. Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS 20c Northern House/3/6. 166. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1976), p. 46. 167. Andrew Duncan, ‘Revolt in the Backlands: Black Torch Book One and the Silenced Voices of History’, in Paul Batchelor, ed., Reading Barry MacSweeney, Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Series 13 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2013), pp. 63–75 (65). 168. See, for example, Jim Burns, Confessions of an Old Believer (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 1996). 169. Barry Tebb, Bridge Over the Aire (Sutton, Surrey: Sixties Press, 2015), Book 4: 15 p. 253. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 425
170. Tebb, Bridge Over the Aire in Collected Poems (Sutton, Surrey: Sixties Press, 2003), Book 4:13, p. 252. 171. Tebb, op. cit., Book 4, 28, pp. 256–257. See Harrison, ‘Cremation’, THCP, p. 136. 172. Gordon Brown, ed., High on the Walls: An Anthology Celebrating Twenty- five Years of Poetry Readings at Morden Tower (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1990). 173. See https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/about. 174. Astley, Land of Three Rivers. 175. https://poemofthenorth.co.uk. 176. Douglas Dunn, Terry Street (1969) in Douglas Dunn, New Selected Poems 1964–2000 (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 3–15. Subsequent refer- ences will be to this edition. 177. Dunn interviewed in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 16. 178. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Moving Towards a Vernacular of Compassion: The Happier Life, Love or Nothing and Barbarians’ in Robert Crawford and David Kinloch, eds, Reading Douglas Dunn, Modern Scottish Writers Series (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 32–50 (35). 179. Douglas Dunn, ‘Bête Noire’s Edition of Terry Street with Photographs by Robert Whittaker’, in The Year’s Afternoon (London: Faber, 2000), pp. 69–72 (71). Not in DDSP. 180. Clive James, ‘Adding up the Detail’, Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1969), 1330. 181. Edwin Morgan, ‘Glasgow 5 March, 1971’, Instamatic Poems in Collected Poems 1949–1987 (1990); rprnt (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 217. 182. Morgan, ibid. 183. Morgan, ‘Nice 5 March 1971’, op. cit., p. 218. 184. Tom Pickard, ‘Unemployed’, High on the Walls, in Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), p. 3. 185. Pickard, op. cit., p. 41. 186. Barry MacSweeney, Ranter (Lenter, Nottingham: Slow Dancer, 1985). 187. Luke Roberts, Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 157. 188. Roberts, Barry MacSweeney, p. 158. 189. MacSweeney, op. cit., p. 140. 190. MacSweeney, op. cit., p. 149. 191. E.P. Thompson and Marian Sugden, ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ by Stephen Duck and ‘The Woman’s Labour’ by Mary Collier: Two Eighteenth-Century Poems (London: Merlin Press, 1989), introduction, p. vii. 426 S. BYRNE
192. https://proletarianpoetry.com. 193. Rebecca Watts, ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’, PN Review 239, 44: 3 (January–February 2018). https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/ scribe?item_id=10090, n.p. 194. Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 56–77. 195. Easthope, op. cit., p. 68. E.L. Epstein, Language and Style (London: Methuen, I978), p. 44. Easthope’s note. 196. Easthope, op. cit., p. 70. 197. Easthope, op. cit., p. 71. 198. Easthope, op. cit., p. 76. 199. A misprint in THCP, p. 133 gives the phonetic symbol as A rather than ∧. 200. Douglas Dunn, ‘Class Photograph’, The Noise of a Fly (London: Faber, 2017). 201. Harry Hemsley, theme from ‘The Ovaltineys’, Radio Luxembourg 1935–1950. 202. In a Start-rite campaign during the 1970s, grown-up celebrities, a female model and a male pop singer were depicted with a tiny Start-rite shoe bal- anced on the end of an extended foot with the caption ‘Designed exclusively for children’. See the advertising archive: http://www.advertisingarchives. co.uk/?service=search&action=do_quick_search&language= en&q=Start-Rite. 203. Liz Berry, Black Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 2014). Subsequent references will be to this edition.
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Morrison, Blake, ‘The Filial Art: A Reading of Contemporary British Poetry’, Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987), 179–217. Mort, Helen, Division Street. London Chatto and Windus, 1984. Mortimer, A.R., ed., Poetry and Audience 1953–60: An Anthology. Leeds: Leeds University, 1961. Muldoon, Paul, ‘A Tight Wee Place in Armagh’, Fortnight 206 (July–August, 1984), 19–23. ———, ‘Interview by Alan Jenkins, “Reclaiming Poetry”’, Sunday Times (14 December 1986). O’Brien, Carl, and Deirdre Falvey, ‘Feeder Schools: Social Class Still Drives School League Tables’, The Irish Times (3 December 2015). http://www.irishtimes. com/news/education/feeder-schools-social-class-still-drives-school- league-tables-1.2451880. O’Brien, Dave, Daniel Laurison, Andrew Miles, and Sam Friedman, ‘Are the Creative Industries Meritocratic? An Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey’, Cultural Trends 25 (2016), 116–131. Abstract. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09548963.2016.1170943. O’Donoghue, Bernard, ‘Review: Magic Mushrooms’, Poetry Review 73, no. 4 (January 1984), 53–55. ———, ‘Moving Towards a Vernacular of Compassion: The Happier Life, Love or Nothing and Barbarians’, in Reading Douglas Dunn, Modern Scottish Writers Series, eds Robert Crawford and David Kinloch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992, pp. 32–50. Pickard, Tom, Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014. Poems of the North. https://poemofthenorth.co.uk. Potts, Robert, ‘The Poet at Play’, Guardian (12 May 2001). https://www.the- guardian.com/books/2001/may/12/poetry.artsandhumanities. Proletarian Poetry. https://proletarianpoetry.com. Pybus, Rodney, ‘Jon Silkin 1930–1997’, Stand 39, no. 2 (Spring 1998), 5. Raftery, Adrian E., and Michael Hout, ‘Maximally Maintained Inequality: Expansion, Reform and Opportunity in Irish Education, 1921–1975’, Sociology of Education 66, no. 1 (1993): 41–62. Raine, Craig, A Free Translation. Edinburgh: The Salamander Press, 1981. ———, ‘Interview by Angela Lambert, “The hero of his own unrhymed triplets: Craig Raine is happy, successful, doesn’t believe in modesty and got £60,000 for his new book. Not bad for a poet”’, Independent (30 August 1994), 23. ———, ‘Interview, “Fate plays an electrifying hand”’, The Northern Echo (28 October 2002), 11. Reid, Christopher, ed., Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Roberts, Neil, ‘Poetry and class Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 8 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AFTER THE 1960S 431
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A Amtower, Laurel, 30, 31, 34, 35, Act for preventing abuses in print 83 seditious, treasonable, and Engaging Words, 89n18 unlicensed books and pamphlets, Andrews, Kerri, 185 and for regulation of printing and Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, printing-presses, The, 197n24 202n116 Addison, Joseph, 154, 167, 168, 170, Army Bureau of Current Affairs, The, 181 336 Spectator, 154, 342, 343 Arner, Lynn, 33, 34, 49, 59 Aers, David Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, Rising, 90n36 and Piers Plowman,’ 17n51, Arnold, Matthew, 324 87n2, 95n126 Culture and Anarchy, 349n75 Aldabéro, Bishop, 23 Artists for War, 336 Altick, Richard D., 4, 359, 360 Arts Council, The, 336, 337, 345, ‘The Sociology of Authorship,’ 397, 400 16n28, 417n9 Ascham, Roger, 115 Alvarez, A., 318, 345, 346, 357 The Scholemaster, 138n34 The New Poetry, 345 Ashforth, David, 279 Amis, Kingsley, 342–345, 367 ‘The Urban Poor Law,’ ‘My Kind of Comedy,’ 353n145 302n97 ‘Nocturne,’ 344 Ashraft, P.M., 2 ‘Something Nasty in the Bookshop,’ Introduction to Working-Class 343 Literature, 2, 259
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
© The Author(s) 2020 433 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4 434 INDEX
Asquith, Herbert, 313, 315, 316 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 150 ‘The Fallen Subaltern,’ 315 ‘The Invitationto Miss B….,’ 150 ‘The Volunteer,’ 313 Barnes, William, 282, 283 ‘The Western Line,’ 315 Barr, Helen, 54, 55, 69–71, 75 Association for Preserving Liberty and ‘Major Episodes and Moments in Property against Republicans and Piers Plowman B,’ 95n128 Levellers, 214 The Piers Plowman Tradition, 74, Astley, Neil, 260, 406 91n43, 93n83, 93n96, Bloodaxe Books, 405–406 98n185, 98n187, 98n188 Land of Three Rivers, 260, 406 ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Auden, W.H., 311, 327–334, Third Estate,’ 98n172 341–343, 369, 373 Barrell, John, 164 and Marxism, 333 Poetry, Language and Politics, quoted in Dennis Davison, 351n108 W.H. Auden, 351n101 Bate, Sir Jonathan, 371, 372 works; ‘As We Like it,’ 331, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, 351n96; ‘At the Grave of 419n54 Henry James,’ 331, 351n97; Bathurst, Ralph, 134 ‘The Cave of Making,’ 330, ‘To the Lord Protector,’ 143n111 350n92; ‘VIII’ (‘Brothers who Batsleer, Janet, 1 when the sirens roar’), 332, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke 351n100; ‘Get there if you and Christ Weedon, eds, can,’ 328; ‘Letter to Lord Rewriting English, 15n7 Byron,’ 328, 348n45; ‘IX’ [I BBC Third Programme, 336 have a Handsome Profile’], Beal, Peter, 113, 114 330, 350n93; ‘The Novelist,’ In Praise of Scribes, 138n25 348n45; ‘XXIV’ [‘Birthday Beattie, James, 166 Poem’], 348n45, 350n89 ‘The Minstrel,’ 166 Authors, proliferation of, 199n69 Benson, Gerard, Judith Chernaik and unsigned article, ‘Memoirs of Society Cicely Herbert, 416n3 of Grub-Street,’ 199n69 Poems on the Underground, 357, Avery, Valerie, 416n7 416n3 London Morning, 416n7 Bentham, Jeremy, 214 London Shadows, 416n7 Anarchical Fallacies, 214 London Spring, 416n7 Bentley, Paul, 2, 372, 385, 394 Ted Hughes, Class and Violence, 2 Berners, Dame Julia, 24 B on falconry, 24 Ball, John, 45, 48, 313 Blair, Kirstie and Mina Gorji, 2, 213, See also English Risings, The 259 [Peasants’ Revolt] Class and the Canon, 2, 259 Bamford, Samuel, 272, 273, 284 Bloomfield, Robert, 171, 195, 213, ‘God Help the Poor,’ 284 215–247, 273 INDEX 435
and patronage, 213, 215 Burrow, John, 82 works; The Farmer’s Boy, 215, 216, ‘Honour and Shame in Sir Gawain 219; ‘Lines Occasioned by a and the Green Knight,’ 99n206 Visit to Whittlebury Forest in Bury, Richard de, 35, 91n48 August 1800,’ 218; Rural Philobiblon, 35 Tales, Ballads and Songs, 215 Butler, Christopher, 335 Book After the Wake, 351n109 ownership, 30–51 Butler, Marilyn, 399 production, 30, 31 Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Bowlby, Rachel, 321 253n113 Just Looking, 349n56 Bradbury, Malcolm, 360, 366–368 The Social Context of Modern English C Literature, 417n12 Caesar, Adrian, 5, 328, 331 Breen, Richard, and Christopher ‘Auden and the Class System,’ T. Whelan, 6, 373 350n88 Social Mobility and Social Class in Carcanet and Carcanet Press, 397–399 Ireland, 17n39, 419n69 See also PN Review Brewer, D.S., 29, 63–65 Carew, Thomas, 127 ‘Class Distinction in Chaucer,’ ‘To Ben Jonson,’ 127 89n14 ‘To My Worthy Friend British Council, The, 336 M. D’Avenant Vpon his British Labour Force Survey, The, 401 Excellent Play The Just Italian,’ Brown, Gordon, 425n172 141n92 High on the Walls, 425n172 Carey, John See also Morden Tower The Intellectuals and the Masses, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 267, 322 272, 292 Carlyle, Thomas, 268, 269, 284, 287, ‘The Cry of the Children,’ 292 294–296 Brownjohn, Alan, 384 Chartism, 299n52 ‘The Fascination of What’s Shooting Niagara: And After?, 294 Difficult,’ 422n112 Carson, Ciaran, 375, 379, 380, Brydges, Egerton, Sir, 231 421n97 autobiography, 231 Education; Queen’s University Bunting, Basil, 386, 405, 409 Belfast, 375, 380; St Mary’s Briggflatts, 386 Christian Brothers’ School, Burke, Edmund, 214 379–380 Reflection on the Revolution in interviewed by Ada Edemariam in France, 214 the Guardian, 380 Burns, Robert, 165–167, 171, 265, interviewed by Elmer Kennedy- 270 Andrews, 421n97 unsigned notice of:Edinburgh representation of father, 379 Magazine, 166 works; The Star Factory, 421n97 436 INDEX
Carter, Richard, 134 Clarke, Fred, 361 The Schismatick Stigmatized, 134 Education and Social Change, Castiglione, Montefeltro Baldassare 417n16 Book of The Courtier, 124 Class, social Caudwell, Christopher, 260, 261, 323 Britain; aristocracy/ gentils/ nobles, Studies in a Dying Culture, 349n68 9, 24, 33, 34, 50, 64, 73–83 Caxton, William, 114–118 (see also Chivalry; Courtesy); Channing (no first name) bourgeois, 9, 10, 47, 156, 312, ‘Tendency of the Present Age,’ 320, 323, 324, 334, 335; craft 300n64 guilds, 44, 61; gentry, 4, 30, ‘Wordsworth,’ 300n65 50, 51, 161; merchants, 4, 44, Charles I, King, 128, 131, 132, 135, 51, 52, 69; middling sort, 112, 153 133, 149, 151, 161, 184, 234; Chartist poetry peasantry/agricultural workers, Posters, 284, 314 Labourers, Ordinance of, Chartists, 214 95n124, 96n132; peasantry/ Chatterton, Thomas, 165, 171, 224, agricultural workers, Labourers, 241 Statute of, 96n132; peasantry/ Chaucer, Geoffrey, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37, agricultural workers, Holy 49, 50, 52, 59–61, 63–67, 77, Peasant, 164, 165, 198n41; the 78, 89n13, 119, 156, 164, 242 three estates, 23, 29, 39, 51, The Canterbury Tales, 35, 36, 52, 53, 67, 89n13; Tudor new 58, 61, 63, 66 man, 112; working class, ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse,’ 67 Factory Acts, 299n50; working Parliament of Fowls, 51 class, labouring class poetry, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, 114 403; working class, labouring Troilus and Criseyde, 37, 60 conditions, 260, 267, 288; ‘Truth,’ 67, 68, 173, 285 working class, publication, 5, Childs, Peter, 2, 341, 368, 369 172, 263 The Twentieth Century in Poetry, 2 Ireland, 373 Chivalry, 75–78, 80–84, 100n207, Clifford, Margaret, 119 311, 314–316 and Æmilia Lanyer, 119 Christmas, William, 178, 196n1, 216, Cockney School, The, 242–244 290 Cole, Charles, 262 ‘The Farmer’s Boy and ‘Love of Liberty,’ 298n26 Contemporary Politics,’ Political and Other Poems, 298n26 249n24 Cole, G.D.H., 299n49 Churchill, Charles Chartist Portraits, 299n49 The Author, 159 Coleman, Janet, 33, 46 Civil Wars, English, 126–132 English Literature in History Clare, John, 165, 273 1350–1400, 93n85 INDEX 437
Collini, Stefan, 13 D ‘Grievance Studies,’ 19n78 Davenport, Allen, 261, 262 Conquest, Robert, 154, 342, 345 ‘The Poet’s Hope,’ 261 New Lines, 345, 346 Davie, Donald, 342, 343 Cooper, Thomas, 263, 269, 272, 284, works; ‘Cherry Ripe,’ 343; 285 ‘Rejoinder to a Critic,’ 343; Purgatory of Suicides, The, 284 ‘Too Late For Satire,’ 343 The Paradise of Martyrs, 285 Day, Gary, 9–11 ‘To the Young Men of the Working- Class, 17n50 Classes,’ 300n74, 300n75 Defoe, Daniel, ‘Of Academies,’ Corcoran, Neil, 2, 358, 377, 152–154, 196n8 390 Dickens, Charles, 262, 267, 291, The Cambridge Companion to 292 Twentieth-Century English speech in Birmingham, 298n30 Poetry, 2 works; ‘The Fine Old English English Poetry Since 1940, 2 Gentleman,’ 292; ‘Hymn of the Coteries, 5, 107, 114, 117, 122, 189, Wiltshire Labourers,’ 291 240, 241, 359, 404 Diepeveen, Leonard, 311 The Council for the Encouragement The Difficulties of Modernism, of Music and the Arts (CEMA), 346n4 336 Dimmock, Spencer, The Origin of Courtesy, 75, 76, 78–82, 87, 124 Capitalism, 136n4 Cowper, William, 188, 229, 238 Disle, Henry, 121 Letters, 252n89 The Paradise of Dainty Devices, Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas, 111, 121 112 Disraeli, Benjamin ‘Exhortation concerning good order Sybil, or, the Two Nations, and obedience to rulers and 298n29 magistrates, An,’ 137n17 Dodsley, Robert Crassons, Kate, 69–71 A Muse in Livery, or The Footman’s Claims of Poverty, 98n174 Miscellany, 192, 193 Crawford, Robert, 395 ‘Servitude,’ 192, 205n154 Identifying Poets, 423n145 Domesday Book, The, 49 Crouch, David, 80 Driscoll, Lawrence, 1 ‘Chivarly and Courtliness,’ 99n201 Evading Class in Contemporary Crowley, Robert, 109 British Literature, 1 Pleasure and Payne, Heaven and Driver, Felix, 279 Hell, 109 Power and Pauperism, Cunningham, Valentine, 352n129 302n98 British Writers of the Thirties, Dryden, John, 135, 154 352n129 Astræa Redux, 143n113 438 INDEX
Duck, Stephen, 167, 171–186, 188, Education Act (England, 1944), 192–195, 202n109, 215–217, 346, 369, 372 242, 290, 410 Education Act (Northern Ireland, and patronage, 172, 184, 194 1947), 358, 380 works; ‘On Richmond Park and Education Act (Scotland, 1945), Royal Gardens,’ 181; Poems on 369 Several Occasions, 173, 175, in Ireland, 421n100 (see also Breen, 178, 183; ‘ The Thresher’s Richard, and Christopher Labour,’ 216 T. Whelan) Duff, William, 170 public schools, 4, 313, 317 An Essay on Original Genius, scholarships, 359–376 200n72 Edward III, King, 35, 53, 73 Dunn, Douglas Commons petition, 70 in conversation with Gerry Edwards, A.S.G., 116 Cambridge, 418n46 ‘The Circulation of English Verse in in conversation with John Manuscript,’ 139n46 Haffenden, 425n177 Edwards, Thomas, 134 interviewed by W.N. Herbert, 370 Gangraena, 134 works; ‘Bête Noire’s Edition of Elliot, Ebenezer, 264, 265, 267, 269, Terry Street with Photographs 273, 287, 288 by Robert Whittaker,’ Corn-Law Rhymes, 287 425n179; ‘Class Photograph,’ ‘The Village Patriarch,’ 298n34 413; ‘Gardeners,’ 369; Terry Eliot, T.S., 324, 345, 375 Street, 368, 369, 407, 408; ‘The Class and the Elite,’ 348n41 ‘The Topical Muse,’ 418n51 ‘Modern Education and the Dyer, Christopher, 43 Classics,’ 348n40 Everyday Life in Medieval England, The Waste Land, 326 92n67 Ely, Steve, 213, 371, 385 Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire, 419n58 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 124 E The Boke Named the Governour, 124 Eagleton, Terry, 5 Engels, Friedrich, 6 Criticism and Ideology, 424n166 The Condition of the Working Class Easthope, Antony in England in 1844, 252n91, Poetry as Discourse, 197n13 298n29 Economic and Social Research Englander, David, 280 Institute report, Leaving School in Poverty and Poor Law Reform, Ireland, 373 302n102 Education English Commonwealth, The, and the Church of England, 132–135 111–112, 133–134 English Risings, The [Peasants’ Education Act (1870), 325, 334 Revolt], 33 INDEX 439
Enright, D.J., 327, 342–346 G ‘Class,’ 353n150 Garrick, David, 184, 190, 202n116 ‘The Interpreters,’ 343 Gawain Poet, The, 30, 80, 87 ‘The Noodle Vendor’s Flute,’ Cleanness, 68, 78 346 Gawain and the Green Knight, 67, Poets of the 1950’s: An Anthology of 75, 86 New English Verse, 350n83 Giddens, Anthony, 12 ‘The Poor Wake up Quickly,’ Beyond Left and Right, 18n72 346 Gilchrist, Octavius, 165 Epstein, James, 259 ‘Some Account of John Clare, An The Lion of Freedom, 259 Agricultural Labourer and See also O’Connor, Feargus Poet,’ 198n42 Gillespie, Alexandra, 31 Print Culture and the Medieval F Author, 89n21 Factory children, 286 Goldberg, Brian, 213, 234 Farley, Erin, 295 The Lake Poets and Professional The People’s Voice, 304n147 Identity, 248n2, 251n75 Felsenstein, Frank, 191 Goodridge, John, 2, 176, 181 ‘Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Goodridge, John (general editor), Patronage,’ 204n146 260 Forbes, Peter, 357 and Bridget Keenan, 2 ‘The Reviewer,’ 416n4 Nineteenth-century Labouring-class Forman, Valerie Poets, 260, 297n13, 299n48, Tragicomic Redemptions, 137n16 302n103 Forrester, Fanny, 262 Googe, Barnabe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and ‘The Lowly Bard,’ 298n27 Sonettes, 118 Fox, Pamela, 1 Gordon, George, Lord Byron Class Fictions, 1 Hours of Idleness, 240 Frantzen, Allen J., 311 Gower, John, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, Bloody Good, 346n3 40, 42, 43, 48–50, 70, 73, 112, Freedman, Paul, 70 119 Images of the Medieval Peasant, Confessio Amantis, 36, 37, 48 91n58 Cronica Tripertita, 73 Fullom, Stephen Watson Mirour de l’Omme, 36, 37 Poor-Law Rhymes or Anti-Marcus, Vox Clamantis, 36, 37, 39 302n108 Graves, Robert, 320, 321, Fumerton, Patricia, 110 348n49 Unsettled, 137n10 Survey of Modernist Poetry, Fussell, Paul, 313, 317, 389 320 The Great War and Modern Great War poetry, 311 Memory, 347n13, 422n130 Classical allusions, 313 440 INDEX
Greene, Darragh, 66 Effort,’ 394; ‘Facing North,’ ‘Moral Obligations, Virtue Ethics, 383; The Gaze of the Gorgon, and Gentil Character in 320; ‘A Good Read,’ 378, 383; Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,’ ‘Heredity,’ 378; ‘The Icing 97n162 Hand,’ 385; ‘Isolation,’ 394; ‘A Grigson, Geoffrey, 327, 328 Kumquat for John Keats,’ 414; New Verse, 327 ‘Laureate’s Block,’ 414; ‘The Groves, Ellis Spencer Lords of Life,’ 366, 383, 384; The New Poor Law, 293 ‘Marked with D,’ 378, 385; Guardian, The, 273, 357 ‘Me Tarzan,’ 365, 366; New Generation Poets, 357 Newcastle is Peru, 404, 410, Guillory, John, 151, 164 414; ‘An Old Score,’ 383; ‘On Cultural Capital, 151, 196n5 Not Being Milton,’ 366; ‘The Rhubarbarians,’ 366, 379, 411; The School of Eloquence, 365, H 366, 378, 379, 383–385, 394; Halpern, Martin, 156 ‘Self Justification,’ 383; ‘Social ‘On the Two Chief Metrical Modes Mobility,’ 383, 410; ‘Testing in English,’ 197n16 the Reality,’ 394; ‘Them & [uz] Hannay, Margaret, 119 I and II,’ 365; ‘Turns,’ 383, Silent But for the Word, 140n56 394, 414; Trackers of Harrison, Tony, 1, 2, 273, 274, 343, Oxyrhynchus, 366; v., 366, 390, 365–372, 375, 377–379, 391, 407; ‘Working,’ 366; ‘Y,’ 383–387, 390, 391, 394, 395, 410 401–407, 411, 414, 418n51, Hartley, Anthony, 342 422n111 ‘Poets of the Fifties,’ 352n134 Education; Leeds Grammar School, Hattaway, Michael, 115 372; Leeds University, 403, A New Companion to Renaissance 405 Literature and Culture, Representation of father, 358, 376, 138n36 378, 383, 385, 394, 414 Haywood, Ian, 1, 259 works; The Big H, 366; ‘Book Ends Working-Class Fiction, 1 I,’ 377, 394; ‘Book Ends II,’ Hazell, Dinah, 83, 84 377; ‘Breaking the Chain,’ 394; Poverty in Late Middle English ‘A Celebratory Ode on the Literature, 100n211 Abdication of Charles III,’ 414; Hazlitt, William, 225, 227–229, 233, ‘Clearing,’ 394; ‘Cremation,’ 234, 237, 239, 240, 245 425n171; ‘Currants I,’ 394; ‘Fine Arts, Whether they are ‘Cypress and Cedar,’ 383; Promoted by Academies,’ 228 ‘Deathwatch Dancethon,’ 414; Lectures on the English Poets, ‘Deep and Crisp and Even,’ 250n53, 251n78 385; Earthworks, 404; ‘The ‘The Periodical Press,’ 228 INDEX 441
The Round Table, 249n43 Hervey, Tamara, 119 Table Talk, 250n56 Figuring Modesty in Feminist Heaney, Seamus, 370, 374, 375, Discourse, 140n56 378–384, 386, 394, 395, 406, Hill, Christopher, 107, 109 418n51 The English Revolution 1640, An and English literary language, 374 Essay, 136n7 Education; Anahorish School, 374; Intellectual Origins of the English Queen’s University Belfast, Revolution Revisited, 136n1 375, 380; St Columb’s College, Hill, Frank, 295 374, 375, 379 Tea! Tea!! Tea!!!, 296 Interviewed by Nigel Farndale, Hill, Geoffrey, 403, 404, 406 421n94 in Leeds, 403 Representation of father, 378, 379, Hilliard, Christopher 383 To Exercise Our Talents, 1 Representation of mother, 382, 394, Hilton, Rodney Howard, 93n97, 395 96n130 works; ‘Belderg,’ 386; ‘Clearances Class Conflict and the Crisis of III,’ 394; ‘Clearances V,’ 394; Feudalism, 96n130 ‘Clearances VI,’ 394; Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 279 ‘Clearances VIII,’ 395; The Idea of Poverty, 301n95 ‘Crossings,’ 379; ‘Digging,’ Hoggart, Richard, 122, 218, 336, 379, 382; ‘Feeling into Words,’ 342, 364, 365, 370, 374, 376, 423n144; ‘Follower,’ 379; ‘The 377 Harvest Bow,’ 382; The Uses of Literacy, 336, 364 ‘Mossbawn,’ 420n74, 421n95; Hogle, Jerrold E., 239 ‘The Ministry of Fear,’ 375; Holberton, Edward, 134, 135, ‘North,’ 375, 386; ‘Squarings,’ 143n112 379; ‘Station Island,’ 379 Poetry and the Cromwellian Henry V, King, 315 Protectorate, 142n110 Herrick, Robert, 128, 129, 180, 343 Holbrook, David, 346 ‘His Cavalier,’ 128 ‘Living? Our Supervisors Will Do ‘The Difference Between Kings and That For Us!,’ 346 Subjects,’ 128 Holloway, John, 342, 343 Hesperides, 128, 129 ‘Epitaph for a Man,’ 353n144 ‘The Hock-cart or Harvest Home,’ ‘New Lines in English Poetry,’ 129, 180 352n132 ‘To Dean-bourne,’ 128 Hood, Thomas, 267, 288–292 ‘To the King to Cure the Evill,’ ‘The Bridge of Sighs,’ 290 128 ‘Lay of the Labourer,’ 289 ‘To the King, Upon his Comming ‘The Pauper’s Christmas Carol,’ with his Army into the West,’ 290 128 ‘The Song of the Shirt,’ 288, 289; 442 INDEX
Horace, Ars Poetica, 200n71 I Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 124 Independent presses, 357, 396–406 Hughes, Ted, 322, 367, 371, 372, Association of Little Presses, 397 375, 378, 379, 385–390, 394, Interregnum, The, 132–136 406, 418n53, 423n142 and violence/war, 376–393 education; Cambridge University, J 372, 375; Mexborough James I, King, 115, 126, 131, 153 Grammar School, 371, 372 ‘Speech in the Star Chamber,’ letters, 371, 372, 387, 388, 393 141n89 representation of brother, 372, 385, ‘Speech to the Lords and Commons 388, 423n142 of the Parliament at White- representation of father, 378, 379, hall,’ 141n89 387, 388, 394 The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, or works; ‘The Ancient Heroes and the the Reciprock and Mvtvall Bomber Pilot,’ 387, 390; Dvetie Betwixt a Free King, and ‘Bayonet Charge,’ 387; ‘Dust His Naturall Subjects, 141n88 As We Are,’ 387; ‘Flanders,’ James, Clive, 407 389; ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers,’ Jameson, Frederic, 3, 13, 14 387; ‘Hardcastle Crags,’ 386, The Political Unconscious, 16n23 394; ‘Hawk in the Rain,’ 389; Janowitz, Anne, 213 ‘Leaf Mould,’ 394; ‘A Masque Lyric and Labour in the Romantic for Three Voices,’ 387; ‘My Tradition, 248n3, 300n62 Uncle’s Wound,’ 387; ‘Out 1, Javitch, Daniel, 125 The Dream Time,’ 387; Poetry and Courtliness in Remains of Elmet, 387, 389; Renaissance England, 141n85 ‘The Rock,’ 422n131, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in 423n133; ‘Six Young Men,’ Elizabethan England, Guazzo’s 387; ‘Skylarks,’ 389; ‘Thistles,’ Civile Conversation and 386, 389; ‘Thrushes,’ 389; Castiglione’s Courtier,’ ‘The Trance of Light,’ 387; 140n75 ‘Walt,’ 387; ‘Warriors of the John, Edmund, 315 North,’ 386 ‘In Memoriam,’ 315 Hunt, Leigh, 214, 241–245, 266 Johnson, Samuel, 154, 194, 240 Hunter, G.K., 124, 125 Johnston, Michael, 86, 87, 88n10 John Lyly, 141n80 Romance and the Gentry in Late Hutton, Mary, 263, 280, 281 Medieval England, 88n10 ‘An Industrious Englishman,’ Jolas, Eugène, transition, 321 278 Jones, Ernest, 261, 263, 269–271, ‘Ode to Labour,’ 278 274 ‘On The Poor Laws’ Amendment ‘Onward,’ 270 Bill,’ 280 ‘The Poet’s Mission,’ 261 INDEX 443
Jones, Ken, 417n24 Kirkup, James, 386 Education in Britain: 1944 to the ‘To the Ancestral North,’ 386 Present, 417n24 Klaus, Gustav, 2, 183, 192, 259 Jonson, Ben, 127, 345 The Literature of Labour, 2, 259 Joyce, James, 379, 380 Knighton, Henry, 36, 45, 47 Ulysses, price of editions, 322 Chronicon Henrici Knighton, Julian, Robert, 113, 114 92n75 Justice, Stephen, 45 Knights, L.C., 123 Writing and Rebellion, 92n75 Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 140n71 Kovalev, Y.V., 300n60 K The Literature of Chartism, 300n60 Kearney, Richard, 380 Postnationalist Ireland, 421n101 Keats, John, 165, 213, 238, 241–246, L 374 Lambeth Loyalist Declaration, The, Letters, 252n88, 252n89 214 Reviews in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Landry, Donna, 188, 191, 203n127, Magazine, 226, 242, 292 203n134 Reviews in the Quarterly Review, The Muses of Resistance, 203n127 226, 242, 244 Langland, William, 30, 33, 34, 45, 55, Keen, Maurice, Chivalry, 76 59, 164 Keenan, Bridget, 2, 202n107 Piers Plowman, 30, 45 Keery, James, 370 Lanyer, Æmilia, 119, 120 ‘The Zone of Thermal Death,’ Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 120 418n49 See also Clifford, Margaret Kennedy, David, 2, 16n17, 358, 376, Larkin, Philip, 314, 320, 342, 345, 377, 384 346, 368–370 New Relations, 417n8, 418n52 ‘At Grass,’ 345 “What does the fairy DO?,” 2, ‘Church Going,’ 314, 346 16n17 Introduction to Jill, 353n145 Keynes, Maynard, interview, 262, Statement preceding a selection in 337 Enright’s Poets of the 1950’s, Kimmelmann, Bert, 31–33 353n154 ‘The Trope of Reading in the Larrissey, Edward Fourteenth Century,’ 89n23 The Cambridge Companion to British Kingsley, Charles, 298n29 Poetry, 1945–2010, 1 Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, Larrissy, Edward, 1 298n29 Lau, Beth, 241 Kirk, John, 1 ‘Class and Politics in Keats’s The British Working Class in the Admiration of Chatterton,’ Twentieth Century, 1 252n100 444 INDEX
Lawrence, D.H., 323–325, 328, 342, Longley, Edna, 376, 421n107 349n71 “When Did You Last See Your ‘City-Life,’ 323 Father?,” 420n83 ‘Cry of the Masses,’ 323 Lonsdale, Roger, 195 ‘The Education of the People,’ Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry, 349n69 195 ‘Evil is Homeless,’ 349n65 The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth- ‘Embankment at Night, Before the Century Verse, 205n168 War: Outcasts,’ 323 Loose, Margaret A., 285 ‘How Beastly the Bourgeois is,’ 324 The Chartist Imaginary, 302n110 ‘Humanity Needs Pruning,’ 323 Love, Harold, see Marotti, Arthur F. ‘Red-Herring,’ 324 Lovelace, Richard, 129 Laycock, Samuel, 261, 262 ‘The Ant,’ 130 ‘What! Another Cracked Poet,’ ‘To Lucasta from Prison,’ 129 298n24 Loxley, James, 135 Leavis, F.R., 10, 324, 325, 346 Royalism and Poetry, 142n94 Leavis, F.R. and Denys Thomson, Lucas, John, 332 350n76 ‘Auden’s Politics,’ 351n99 Culture and Environment, 350n76 Lukács, Georg, 6, 323 Lenhart, Gary, 2 The Meaning of Contemporary The Stamp of Class, 2 Realism, 349n68 Leonard, Tom, 376, 406, 410 Lyotard, Jean-François, 11 and Lourdes Comprehensive La condition postmoderne, 18n62 School, 376 Lytton Edward Bulwer, 325 and Pollock Primary School, 376 England and the English, 325 Works; ‘Fathers and Sons,’ 376; ‘Six O’Clock News,’ 410 Lewis, C. Day, 320, 327, 328 M ‘An Expensive Education,’ 320 Macaulay, James, 166 Licensing Act, 158 ‘Rhyming Epistle to Mr R— B—,’ Linton, W.J., 263, 282 166 The Life and Adventures of Bob Thin, Macauley, Thomas Babbington, 267 302n109 Speech to the House of Commons, Literacy, 30–51, 72, 136, 157, 172, 299n51 226, 266, 270, 311, 313, 325, Mack, E.C., 362 326, 394, 415 Public Schools and British Opinion Literary Magazines Since 1860, 417n19 of the 1930s, 327, 350n84 Mackenzie, Henry, 165, 166 of the 1960s, 5 Lounger, editorial, 198n47 Lollards, see Wycliffite MacNeice, Louis, 328, 330 London Society for Constitutional MacSweeney, Barry, 165, 390, 391, Information, 214 397, 405, 408 INDEX 445
Nominated for the Oxford Miller, David, 423n146 Professorship of Poetry, 391 British Poetry Magazines works; Black Torch, 390, 391; ‘The 1914–2000, 423n146 British Poetry Revival, Miller, Edwin Haviland, 63, 122, 1960–75,’ 423n147; Ranter, 123 408, 409; ‘Wolf Tongue,’ 165 The Professional Writer in Maidment, Brian, 259, 287, 288 Elizabethan England, 140n68 The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Milner, Andrew J., 11, 12 Poets and Poetry in Victorian Class, 18n61 Britain, 259 Modernist poetry, 311, 312, 320–327, Mann, Lyndsey A., 97n157 348n49 “Gentilesse” and The Franklin’s Montagu, Elizabeth, 185, 186, 189, Tale, 97n157 190 Marcus, 281, 287 and Hannah More, 189 An Essay on Populousness, 281 Letters, 185, 186 Marcus, David, 378, 379 Montrose, Louis, 19n82 Irish Poets, 1924–1974, 378, ‘Shaping Fantasties,’ 19n82 379 Moore, George, 333, 334 Marcus, Laura, 424n152 Hail and Farewell, 351n104 The Cambridge History of Twentieth- Moore, Thomas, 231 Century Literature, 424n152 Memoirs, Journal and Markels, Julian, 1 Correspondence of Thomas More, The Marxian Imagination, 1 250n61 Marotti, Arthur F., 107, 113, 114, Morden Tower, 14 117, 118, 120, 121 More, Hannah, 170, 172, 184, 185, Manuscript Transmission, 114 189–191, 193, 204n144, 222, Marxism, 10, 11 266 Masculinity and violence, 376–393 Letters, 185, 186, 266 Massey, Gerald, 269, 273, 274, 276, and patronage, 172, 184, 185 277 works; Repository Tracts, 204n142; ‘Our Land,’ 276 Sacred Dramas Chiefly Intended ‘Our Symbol,’ 277 for Young Persons, 200n74; Maxwell, D.E.S., 327 ‘Sensibility, A Poetical Epistle,’ Poets of the Thirties, 350n85 170; ‘The Shepherd of Mayhew, Henry, 298n29 Salisbury Plain in Two Parts,’ London Labour and the London Poor, 204n142 298n29 Morgan, Edwin, 406, 407 McCabe, Robert, 114, 115, 119, 122, ‘Glasgow 5 March, 1971,’ 139n42 407 Ungainefull Arte, 138n29 ‘Nice 5 March 1971,’ 407 Meyers, Jeffrey, 388, 389 Morillo, John D., 213 ‘Ted Hughes: War Poet,’ 422n124 ‘Uneasy Feelings,’ 248n4 446 INDEX
Morrison, Blake, 311, 345, 358, 377, N 378, 384 Nardin, Jane, 191, 204n144 ‘The Filial Art,’ 416n6 ‘Hannah More and the Problem of The Movement:English Poetry and Poverty,’ 191, 203n125 Fiction of the 1950s, 347n8, National Poetry Day, 357 352n133 Newbolt Report, The, 312, 347n12 Mort, Helen, 390, 392 New Hellenism, 215 ‘Scab,’ 390, 392 Nicholls, J.W. Moulton, Ian Frederick, 44 The Matter of Courtesy, 78, 99n199 Reading and Literacy in the Middle Nicholls, Peter, 424n152 Ages and Renaissance, 89n23, The Cambridge History of Twentieth- 92n71 Century Literature, 424n152 Movement, The, 311–312, 341–346, Nicholson, John, 286 396, 402 The Factory-Child, A Poem, 286 Mugglestone, Lynda, 154 The Factory-Child’s Mother, 286 ‘The End of Toleration? Language Nicolson, Harold, 336–341 on the Margins in Samuel Diaries and Letters 1939–1945, Johnson’s Dictionary of the 352n124 English Language,’ 196n11 Norbrook, David, 133 Muldoon, Paul, 370, 375, 378, ‘Levelling Poetry,’ 142n105 380–383, 421n103 Northern House, 14, 403, 404 education, 380, 381; St Patrick’s Norton, Caroline, 299n50 College, Armagh, 380 A Voice from the Factories, 299n50 interview by Alan Jenkins in the Sunday Times, 380 representation of father, 378, 380, O 383 O’Connor, Feargus, 259, 271 representation of mother, 382 See also Epstein, James works; ‘A tight wee place in O’Donoghue, Bernard, 380, 383, 406 Armagh,’ 421n104; ‘Cherish ‘Magic Mushrooms,’ 421n102 the Ladies,’ 383; ‘Come into ‘Moving Towards a Vernacular of my Parlour,’ 382; ‘The Coney,’ Compassion,’ 425n178 381; ‘Gathering Mushrooms,’ Oastler, Richard, 279, 286 381, 383; ‘Immrama,’ 382; The Fleet Papers, 303n120 ‘Milkweed and Monarch,’ 382; Rights of the Poor to Liberty and Life, ‘The Mirror,’ 383; ‘The Mixed 301n96 Marriage,’ 381, 382; Quoof, Olin, Erik Wright, 12 380, 381, 383; ‘Tell,’ 383 ‘The continuing importance of class Mum and the Sothsegger, 49, 74 analysis,’ 18n71 Murphy, Paul, 259 Ordene de chivalerie, 80 Towards a Working-Class Canon, Orwell, George, 334–336, 259 343 INDEX 447
in conversation with Desmond Pierce the Plowman’s Crede, 33, 46, Hawkins, ‘The Writer in the 71, 72, 75, 164 Witness-Box,’ 351n107 Pindar, Peter, Esq, 244 The Lion and the Unicorn, 335 ‘Ode to Tyrants,’ 279 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 335 Plato, 35, 168, 244, 245 Owen, Wilfred, 313, 316–318 Ion, 168 ‘Apologia pro poemate meo,’ 316 Plebeian poets, 5, 149, 164–172, 183, ‘Dulce et Decorum est,’ 318 186, 192, 195, 213, 215, 242, 261, 262, 264, 267, 280, 286, 390 P PN Review, 398, 399, 402, 410 Paine, Tom, 191, 214 Poems of the North website, 406 The Rights of Man, 191, 213 The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pakulski, Jan, 12 Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Paston, John, 51 Gawain and the Green Knight Patmore, Coventry, 1867, 293 (5th revd edn, eds Malcolm Patronage, 5, 50, 113, 116–122, 149, Andrew and Ronald Waldron), 161, 195, 213, 215, 227, 234, 99n189 239, 242, 262, 271, 322, 401 Poetry and Audience, 403 Pauper poetry, 267 Poetry Book Society, The, 345 Pearsall, Derek, 90n36, 98n186 Poetry Society, The, 397 Old English and Middle English Pollack, Sean, 51, 86, 87 Poetry, 98n186 ‘Border States,’ 94n110 Peck, Russell A., 73 Poll Tax (1379), 26 ‘The Politics and Psychology of Poor Law Amendment Act, The, 267 Governance in Gower,’ 98n184 Pope, Alexander, 157, 159, 160, 170, Pender, Patricia, 120 181, 187, 192–195, 219, 246, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 264, 343 140n59 letters, 160, 198n32 Perera, Sonali, 2 and Stephen Duck, 181, 219 No Country, 15n12 works; Of the Use of Riches, 197n22; Petegorsky, David W., 133, 134 ‘Windsor Forest,’ 181, ‘Class Forces in the English Civil 202n107, 219 War,’ 142n104 Potts, Robert, 421n106 Petrarch, Francis, 32, 123, 125 ‘The Poet at Play,’ 421n106 Pettie, George, 123 Press, 203n127 The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Price, Richard, 423n146 Guazzo (translation), 140n74 British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000, Phillips, Edward, 154 423n146 The New World of Words, 154 Prince, John Critchley, 261, 262, 285 Pickard, Tom, 405, 406, 408 ‘The Death of Factory Child,’ 285 ‘Unemployed,’ 408 ‘To Poesy,’ 261 448 INDEX
‘A Proclamation against excesse of Richardson, Malcolm, 44, 46, 47, 49, Lavish and Licentious speech of 92n73 matters of State’, 127n89 Middle-Class Writing in Late Proletarian Poetry website, 410 Medieval London, 92n72 Puttenham, George, 125, 126, 157 Richard the Redeless, 73, 74 Arte of English Poesie, 125 Riding, Laura, 320, 321, 348n49 Survey of Modernist Poetry, 320 Ringen, Stein, 14 R ‘The Open Society and the Closed Raine, Craig, 369, 372, 373, 376, Mind,’ 19n83 378, 383, 393, 395 Rizzo, Betty, 172 education, Barnard Castle School, ‘The Patron as Poet-Maker,’ 372, 373 200n77 interviewed by Angela Lambert in Roberts, Luke, 408 the Independent, 372 Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of interview in the Northern Echo, 373 Post-War British Poetry, profile in theGuardian , 376 425n187 representation of father, 376 Roberts, Neil, 2, 3, 402 works; ‘Hungry Fighter,’ 376; ‘The ‘Poetry and class: Tony Harrison, Season in Scarborough 1923,’ Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean 393; ‘A Silver Plate,’ 376 O’Brien,’ 2 Rainey, Lawrence, 311, 321, 322 Robertson, Reverend Frederick, ‘The of Cultural Economy of 264–266 Modernism,’ 346n5, 349n57 lectures to the Mechanics Institute, Ralph, James, 158, 159 264 The Case of Authors, 158 Romance [genre], 50 Raven, James, 157 Rose, Jonathan, 259, 266, 270, 272 ‘The Book Trades,’ 197n21 The Intellectual Life of the British Rebecca, O’Rourke, 1 Working Classes, 259 Received Pronunciation [RP] and Ross, James, 286 Standard English, 155, 364, 415 The Factory Child’s Father’s Reply to Renen, Denys Van, 136n2 the Factory Child’s Mother, 286 The Other Exchange, 136n2 Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Report from his Majesty’s Writings and Publications, Commissioners for Inquiry into the 214 Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, 302n99 S Representation of the People Act, Sadler, Michael Thomas, 286 304n144 ‘The Factory Child’s Last Day,’ 286 Resolution and Independence, 198n43 Sanders, Mike, 259–261, 269, 274, Richard II, King, 30, 36, 37, 73, 295 277, 298n18, 300n58 INDEX 449
“A Jackass Load of Poetry”:The Sidney, Philip, 121, 125, 168, 316 Northern Star’s Poetry Column Apologie for Poesie, 125 1838–1852, 259 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, 112 Politics, History, 259 Silkin, Jon, see Stand Magazine Sassoon, Siegfried, 316, 317, 348n49 Simon, Brian, 361, 362 ‘The Soldier as Hero,’ 316 ‘The 1944 Education Act: A Scase, Wendy, 34 Conservative measure?,’ ‘Latin Composition Lessons,’ 91n43 417n15 Schekner, Peter, 259 The Politics of Educational Reform, An Anthology of Chartist Poetry, 259 1920–1940, 417n14 Scheuermann, Mona, 204n144 Sinfield, Alan, 312, 335, 337, 338 ‘Hannah More and the English Sir Amadace, 84, 85, 100n213 Poor,’ 204n144 Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, The School of Eloquence, 378 86 Schmidt, Michael, see Carcanet and Sir Launfal, 84 Carcanet Press Skelton, John, 118, 119 Schwartzkopf, Jutta, 297n14 The Garlande of Laurels, 118 Women in the Chartist Movement, Slack, Paul, 110 297n14 Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Scott, J.D., 352n136 Stuart England, 137n10 ‘In the Movement,’ 352n136 Smiles, Samuel, 273 Scribes, 35, 113–115, 122, 137n22, Self-Help, 273 138n23 Smith, Isaac Gregory, 316 Scriveners Company, The, 138n24 ‘Close Your Ranks,’ 316 Seamstresses and slopsellers, 276, 277, Smith, Ken, 401–404, 406, 409 289 Fox Running, 409 Second Reform Act, 293–296 Smollett, Tobias Settlement, Act of, 110 Peregrine Pickle, 159 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 165, 214, 231, Society of the Friends of the People, 238, 239, 242, 244–247, 266, 214 270–272, 339 Solomon, Harry M., 193, 194 letters, 266 The Rise of Robert Dodsley, 205n155 reviews in Blackwood’s Magazine, Song of the Husbandman, 46 239 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 317 works; The Defence of Poetry, 231; ‘XXIX,’ 317 The Masque of Anarchy, 214, Southey, Robert, 167, 196n1, 270, 270; Prometheus Unbound, A 271, 286 Lyrical Drama in Four Acts Lives and Works of Our Uneducated with Other Poems, 245, 247 Poets to Which are Added some Sherry, Richard, 126, 232 Attempts in Verse by John Jones Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 126 An Old Servant, 167 450 INDEX
Speck, W.A., 200n79 Sublime, The ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication,’ longinus On the Sublime, 168 200n79 Swift, Jonathan, 136, 153, 154, 176, Spence, Joseph, 172–174, 181 281 A Full and Authentick Account of ‘On Stephen Duck the Thresher, Stephen Duck, 172 and Favourite Poet,’ 176 Spence, Thomas, 283 Poems on Several Occasions, 201n98 land plan, 283 Proposal for Correcting, Improving, Spencer, Luke, 390 and Ascertaining the English The Poetry of Tony Harrison, Tongue, A, 136, 153 423n136 Spender, Stephen, 327, 328 Spenser, Edmund, 117, 122, 136 T Stamatakis, Chris, 139n48 Tatersal, Robert, 184 Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of ‘The Bricklayer’s Labour,’ 184 Rewriting, 139n48 Taylor, Frank, 316, 347n23 Stand Magazine, 388, 400, 402–404, ‘The English Dead,’ 316, 347n23 408 Tebb, Barry, 404, 405, 424n169, Starkey, David, 124 425n170, 425n171 ‘The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Bridge Over the Aire, 424n169, Tudor Reality,’ 141n76 425n170 Starkey, Thomas, 124 Thomas, Dylan, 338–343, 360 Dialogue between Reginald Pole and ‘Fern Hill,’ 341 Thomas Lupset, 124 Thomas, R.S., 346, 353n159 Stationers Company, The, 115 ‘A Peasant,’ 353n159 Statutes ‘The Welsh Hill Country,’ 353n159 regulation of apparel, 24 Thompson, E.P., 161, 163–165, Stedman Jones, Gareth, 259 219–221, 342, 403, 410 Languages of Class, 259 and Marian Sugden, ‘The Thresher’s Steiner, Emily, 30 Labour’ by Stephen Duck and ‘Commonalty and Literary Form in ‘The Woman’s Labour’ by Mary the 1370s and 1380s,’ 89n17 Collier, 425n191 Stevens, Frances, 364 The Romantics: England in a The New Inheritors, 364 Revolutionary Age, 198n34 Strohm, Paul, 24, 29, 31, 49, 59 Thomson, A.T., 200n87 Middle English, 90n35 Memoirs of the court and times of The Poet’s Tale, 89n22 King George the Second, and his Social Chaucer, 88n7, 94n99, consort Queen Caroline, 96n139 200–201n87 Suarez, Michael J., 195 Thomson, Denys, 350n76 ‘Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and Culture and Environment, the Ghost of Pope,’ 205n161 350n76 INDEX 451
Thomson, James, 161, 162, 179, ‘Who Speaks my Language IV,’ 198n36, 229, 270 344 The Seasons, 161, 198n36, 229 Waldron, Mary, 202n118, 202n120, Timney, Meagan, 263 203n128 Tottel, Richard, 120, 121 Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, Miscellany, 120, 121 202n118, 202n120 Trevelyan, G.M., 325 Waller, Edmund, 151 English Social History: A Survey of Poems Written upon Several Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Occasions and Several Persons, Victoria, 350n79 196n7 Walpole, Horace, 185, 186, 190, 239 U Letters, 199n69 Usk, Adam, 69 Walsingham, Thomas, 41, 43, 45, 46, Chronicles, 69 92n63 Chronica Maiora, 41 Waters, Malcolm, 12 V Weedon, Chris, 1 Van Renen, Denys, 137n15 West, Richard, 199n69 Vandiver, Elizabeth, 311, 314, Letters, 199n69 316–318, 348n33 Westminster Chronicle, The, 42, 61 Stand in the Trench, Achilles, 346n2 White, Simon, 195 Van-Hagen, Steve, 167, 172 Whitworth, Michael H., 311, “But Genius is the Special Gift of 326 God!,” 199n60 Reading Modernist Poetry, 346n6, Vicinus, Martha, 259 350n81 The Industrial Muse, 259 Williams, Raymond, 3, 4, 8, 107, 150, Vincent, David, 250n44, 301n85 160, 183, 230, 231, 312, 324, The Rise of Mass Literacy, 250n44 325, 336, 342, 360, 365 Virtanan, Juha, 423n150 The Country and the City, 203n133 Poetry and Performance During the Culture and Society 1780–1950, British Poetry Revival 196n2 1960–1980, 423n150 The Long Revolution, 3 Politics of Modernism, 352n116 Problems of Materialism and W Culture: Selected Essays, 136n3 Wain, John, 342, 344 ‘The Uses of Literacy,’ 364 ‘Engagement or Withdrawal? Some ‘Working-class Culture,’ 351n113 Notes on the Work of Philip Wilson, Edmund, 367 Larkin,’ 353n145 The Wound and the Bow, 367 ‘Who Speaks my Language III,’ Wilson, Thomas, 126 344 Art of Rhetoric, 126 452 INDEX
Winstanley, Gerrard, 133 Worpole, Ken, 12, 363, 365, 366, ‘The Diggers’ Song,’ 133 417n25 Wipers Times, 313 ‘Scholarship Boy: The Poetry of Wither, George, 115, 127, 130 Tony Harrison,’ 417n25 Britain’s Remembrancer, 127, Worsley, T.C., 362 130 Barbarians and Philistines, 417n18 The British Appeals, 142n103 Wright, David, 277 Hymns and Songs of the Church, ‘The Working Bee,’ 277 115 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 117, 120, 123, The Schollers Purgatory Discovered in 124, 175 the Stationers Common-wealth, ‘Circa Regna Tonat,’ 117, 123 138n35 ‘The Country Mouse and the Town Vox Pacifica, 127 Mouse,’ 123 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 214 ‘Mine Own John Poynz,’ 123 A Vindication of the Rights of ‘Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Woman, 213 Bryan,’ 124 Womack, Peter, 312, 338–341 ‘Stand Whoso List,’ 123 ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen,’ Quyete of Mynde, 117 347n9, 352n123 Verse epistles, 117 Woods, Margaret L., 316 Wycliffite, 49 ‘The First Battle of Ypres’ Woods,’ Wyclif teachings and the Wycliffite 316 heresy, 32 Woodville, Anthony, 116, 124 Earl Rivers, 116, 124 Wordsworth, William, 165, 186, 213, Y 215–247, 251n81, 270, 271, Yearsley, Ann, 171, 172, 174, 175, 324, 390 184–192, 202n118, 203n127, Letters, 235, 249n36, 249n41, 203n128, 204n137, 205n147 251n76 and patronage, 191 works; ‘Essay Supplemental to the works; ‘Clifton Hill,’ 188, 189, Preface,’ 250n57, 251n64, 203n133; ‘Night,’ 187; ‘On 251n68; The Excursion, 233, Mrs Montagu,’ 187, 189; 251n71; Lyrical Ballads, 220, ‘Poem on The Inhumanity of 221, 231, 234, 235, 249n38, The Slave Trade,’ 188; Poems 249n39, 249n40, 251n67; on Several Occasions, 184, 186, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ 190; ‘Portraits in the 222, 223, 225; ‘On the Late Characters of the Muses in the General Fast, 1832,’ 226; The Temple of Apollo,’ 189; Prelude, 220, 225, 234, 235, Preface, 186, 190; The Rural 249n42; ‘Resolution and Lyre, 191 Independence,’ 223; ‘Star Yeats, W.B., 322, 324, 333, 334, Gazers,’ 252n85 343 INDEX 453
and class, 333, 334 Conjectures on Original Composition, works; ‘Introductory Rhymes,’ 199n67, 232 351n103; ‘The Municipal Two Epistles to Mr Pope Concerning Gallery Revisited,’ 351n102; the Authors of the Age, 199n68 ‘To a Wealthy Man who Ywain and Gawain, 84 Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were Proved the Z People Wanted Pictures,’ Zlotnick, Susan, 297n14 351n106 Women Writing and the Industrial Young, Edward, 169, 187, 194, 232 Revolution, 297n14