Introduction

When Raymond Williams wrote of the democratizing of print culture that began in the early modern period as a "long revolution," he sounded a celebratory note. He did not, however, suggest that the transformation would be an easy one.¹ Recovery work in literary history has enriched our understanding of the many writers of laboring background who achieved some success in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many of these writers for whom the epithets "humble," "uneducated," or "labouring" appeared as essential labels—credentials as necessary for entering the literary marketplace as press cards for press conferences—were poets. Their struggles often strike modern readers as heroic, and their careers may seem miraculous. Touched by the numinous hand of celebrity, their sweaty and poorly paid day jobs now put behind them, they emerge in authorial splendor, possessed of slim volumes of verse.

The emergence of these writers into historical view as laborers as well as poets, however, is accompanied by certain critical consequences. As representatives of the working class, the downtrodden and exploited, they are often scrutinized for their political awareness and critical capacities as much as for their mastery of verse forms or ingenuity of poetic innovation. Ideology critique and political-contextual reading have been the dominant forms of critical analysis brought to bear upon these poets. Yet this emphasis might be said to contradict the animating purpose of these writers, in so far as they were first and foremost poets. Whatever their political alignments, poets have traditionally engaged with intoxicated or metaphysical inspiration, if not bardic prophecy; they have committed themselves to demanding forms and to technical expertise, whether they were writing for Ottoman courtiers, city artisans, fellow drinkers at taverns and alehouses, or country gentry, and whether their chosen medium was the broadside ballad or the epic.

The most common question elicited by endeavors to bring neglected writers to light has always been "But were they any good?" Pious answers have often been given to this question: intrinsic historical interest, history from below, righting the historical record with regard to the actual contributions of working-class men and women, challenges to bourgeois aesthetics. Analyzing laboring-class poetry according to strictly formal criteria without some obeisance to the ideological or political stakes involved has rarely been undertaken, if at all. It remains an open question as to whether or not the aesthetic as a category of analysis can ever float entirely free of political or ideological determinants. Yet to subordinate, if not bury entirely, formal and aesthetic questions in favor of social and political ones is to be once again complicit in tying laboring-class writers so tightly to their social difference from polite culture that their achievements cannot be appreciated artistically, but only sociologically. In raising such aesthetic matters, we hope this special issue of Criticism might go some way toward rectifying previous critical imbalances between history and the literary, or politics and aesthetics, with regard to laboring-class writing.

There has now been a sufficient body of textual recovery work done on British laboring-class poets for their collective literary achievement to begin to appear to public view. Laboring-class poets could be glimpsed in revisionist anthologies like Roger Lonsdale's influential Oxford pair or Andrew Carpenter's Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland, but in order to engage in a serious reading of these poets, a good archive or a penchant (and patience) for microfilm was essential.² In just the last few years, however, a wide range of laboring-class poetry has appeared in edited editions both large and small. Noteworthy volumes include Robert Bloomfield's Selected Poems, Isabella Lickbarrow's Collected Poems, the last installment of the magisterial Clarendon edition of John Clare's complete poems, and The Works of Mary Leapor, the first critical edition of a laboring-class poet not named Clare to appear since the late nineteenth century.³ The publication of the monumental Pickering and Chatto edition of poetry by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laboring-class writers marks a watershed in terms of public accessibility and potential knowledge.⁴ Here, over its six volumes and some twenty-five...