ABSTRACT
What use was Shakespeare to working-class readers of the nineteenth century? For nearly every autodidact who discovered in Shakespeare’s works a source of instruction and delight, it seems, some more pragmatic relative or colleague rushed in to interrupt the reading experience with the dour observation that Shakespeare would never put bread on the table.1 These experiences, now available for critical analysis through a small number of published or otherwise preserved autobiographies, are both reflected in and belied by the wider debate about Shakespeare’s relevance that took place in the periodicals published for the nineteenth century’s rather larger population of working-class magazine readers. In these periodicals, Shakespeare was sometimes presented simply as a source of pleasure, but more often as a model for the ambitious working-class intellectual because he was himself a member of that class who had risen through the ranks by virtue of his own innate talents combined with hard work. He was also presented as a useful repository of inflammatory quotations usually deployed devoid of context in support of political radicalism, or sometimes as a dangerous establishment figure whose words and works had resulted in the perpetuation of an unjust class system. Whether Shakespeare might be considered a working-class intellectual himself, and whether his works might be relevant to contemporary working-class issues, was a topic that recurred with surprising frequency in magazines that might be expected to pay rather more attention to putting bread on the table than to placing the plays of a long-dead author into workers’ hands. This debate about Shakespeare’s relevance in the nineteenth century, fundamental to the establishment of a working-class literary canon, focused on the extent to which an established figure of the national canon might resonate with working-class readers. The conservative tendency of Shakespeare appreciation offered by better-remembered Victorian figures such as the prolific Charles Knight was a reaction
to the radical deployments of Shakespeare that continued to exist alongside more conservative ones during the politically fraught decades marked the Peterloo Massacre, in 1819, and the height of Chartist activity leading to Parliament’s rejection of the Chartist petition in 1836.
