ABSTRACT
Certainly there was no shortage of class antagonism throughout this period, and this provided the matrix within which our writers worked. This had operated through class colonialism from the earliest days of folk song collection. Thus, as Dave Harker points out, Pinkerton (best known for Select Scottish Ballads, 1783) was aiming to keep his material out of the hands of the 'vulgar' as part of a literary heritage--although much of it was still in circulation in chapbooks. 1 General class prejudice and bad faith were widespread amongst critics. For example, T. H. Lister pronounced in the Edinburgh Review in 1831 that '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 of defective education.' 2 In 1863, a reviewer in the Daily News complained about Sylvia's Lovers:
We do not mean to say that the grandest heroism and noblest virtues may not be exemplified in low life, but it is trying the patience of readers too far to compel them to wade through three volumes of unpronounceable patois and miserable incidents in order to follow the trail of persons who display a very ordinary amount of either heroism or virtue.3
