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Victorian Periodicals Review 39.1 (2006) 46-66



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"A Jackass Load of Poetry":

The Northern Star's Poetry Column 1838–1852

The recovery of nineteenth-century working-class reading practices has proceeded apace in recent years.1 Paul Murphy's Towards a Working-Class Canon tracks the changing attitudes towards literature expressed in radical journals between 1816 and 1858, whilst Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes demonstrates the deep and persistent drive to cultural literacy within the working-class movement. Most recently, Ian Haywood in The Revolution in Popular Literature has traced the British state's responses to the emergence of the "common reader" in the 1790s, demonstrating that policies of direct repression of the radical press were also accompanied by attempts to provide alternative reading material, thereby making the periodical press one of the most significant sites of political struggle between 1790 and 1860. However, the increased attention paid to working-class literary consumption has not yet extended into the sphere of working-class literary production. This article aims to augment our understanding of the latter through a detailed analysis of one of the richest archives of nineteenth-century workingclass writing, namely the poetry column of the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star.2 During its lifetime, this column published almost 1,500 poems (or excerpts from poems). These poems were the work of at least 390 Chartist poets, the vast majority of whom were working-men. This article provides, for the first time, a full survey of the Northern Star's poetry column, quantifying the number of poems and poets published on an annual basis, as well as the ratio of Chartist produced to non-Chartist produced poems (Table 1).3 In so doing, it provides a much firmer empirical base than has previously existed from which to view the relationship between Chartist poetry and the wider Chartist movement.

A detailed analysis of the Northern Star reveals the dialectical interplay between readership and editor in the creation of the poetry column's editorial [End Page 46] policy. Initially, the sheer volume of poetry produced by rank and file Chartists literally forced the poetry column from the margins to the centre of the paper. Once established as an important Chartist activity in its own right, Chartist poetic production becomes the subject of a number of editorial interventions. This article seeks to reconstruct the editorial policy of the poetry column, thereby demonstrating the importance accorded aesthetic value throughout its existence. In particular, it argues that from 1844 onwards the editor of the column adopted a number of strategies in an attempt to enhance the quality of Chartist poetic production. Furthermore, it argues that raising the standard of Chartist poetry was seen as an important aspect of Chartist strategy.


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Table 1
The Poetry Column of the Northern Star 1838–1852

There has been a marked growth of interest in Chartist poetry over the previous three decades in the disciplines of English and history. In the former, the work of Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, and Gerald Massey, [End Page 47] in particular, has been rediscovered, with their literary significance confirmed by their inclusion in recent anthologies of Victorian poetry.4 In recent years literary scholars have argued that literature in general, and poetry in particular, played an important and hitherto largely unacknowledged role in Chartism. This process of rediscovery began with the work of Martha Vicinus, Mary Ashraf, and Brian Maidment, who not only drew attention to the volume of poetry produced by the early Victorian working class, but also began to theorise its conditions of production, transmission and interpretation.5 Subsequently, the work of Ulrike Schwab and Anne Janowitz has argued that "Chartism as social and political movement made itself culturally intelligible to its constituencies through its use of poetry."6 The significance of Chartist poetry, however, is not confined to its role in the production of the movement's identity; literary production itself was understood as an important strategic activity. As Haywood argues, Chartists believed...

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