ABSTRACT
“Working-class man.” The phrase invokes a familiar jumble of nineteenth-century stereotypes: angry Chartists; rosy peasants; liveried manservants, shifty or pretentious; picturesque idlers in pubs and on street corners; and even a ploughman poet or two. These are the crude character types of popular imagery. They find subtler expression in the characters of John Barton, Adam Bede, Steerforth’s Littimer or Sam Weller; Henry Mayhew’s street interviews; and the brief vogues enjoyed by Robert Burns and John Clare. These stereotypes are so familiar as to be among the standard furnishings of the Victorian novel. What would Margaret Hale do without factory “hands” to tame, and how would we know Oliver Twist’s worth without his underclass tormentors? These images of working-class men are all delineated through the middle- and upper-class media of novels, sociological research and poetic patronage—perhaps appropriately, given their function. The very density of this type of representation creates the impression that outside this bourgeois context, not much literature exists about the working class. Yet this is not the case. Social and labor historians, for example, have written extensively on working-class culture of the nineteenth century. Their sources are largely official: court records, parish registers, Hansard and newspapers. Yet they also consistently draw on a body of autobiographical writing by working-class authors in order to introduce intimate detail and analyze individual responses to larger pressures or ideas. 1
