Some Rhetorical Strategies in Later Nineteenth-Century Laboring-Class Poetry

In his pioneering presentation of Victorian self-taught poets and poetry, The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Brian Maidment organizes his material into three principal areas: "Chartists and Radicals," "The Parnassians," and "Lowly Bards and Homely Writers."¹ Editing my own volume of Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1860–1900, I found these categories useful and accurate in describing much of what was written.² The most compelling poems for me, however, were those that one way or another breached the walls between them. Some of these import "Parnassian" and political writing into "homely" poems, or use dialect forms and local materials to comment on social and cultural issues. They tend to represent communities in serious rather than sentimentalized ways (though this division is by no means clear-cut, as we shall see). And they are often concerned with trying to transform the highly insecure literary position of being a laboring-class poet into a more sustainable means of self-expression and self-representation. By 1860 a tradition of laboring-class poetry was widespread and well established, if by no means secure for the poets involved. A database of laboring-class poets that I have been preparing with colleagues on the laboring-class poets project currently lists 1,420 such poets published in Britain and Ireland between 1700 and 1900, and well over half of these were writing in the second half of the nineteenth century.³ Clearly there were many hundreds of laboring-class poets seeking effective modes of writing and print outlets for poetry in this period. In this essay I shall examine a number of examples of their poetical output and consider some of the literary strategies these poets adopted and critical issues these strategies raise.

In the scholarly "recovery" of hidden or lost traditions like laboring-class poetry, the issue of quality is not any less important for having the potential to be raised, as it were, in bad faith. However much one wishes to resist the familiarly skeptical terminology of "minor" or "second-rate" poets, the question "Are they any good?" is still a trenchant one. One problem in trying to answer it is that within the literary hierarchies that are still widely accepted, whole generic areas of writing are regarded as being inherently inferior. I am thinking here, for example, about melodrama, the first of the literary strategies I want to consider in relation to later-nineteenth-century laboring-class poets. It is a primary example of a form that a number of laboring-class poets use, not just for its obviously popular, attention-grabbing entertainment value, but also for its potential to convey the drama of social and individual crisis. The poet Fanny Forrester (1852–1889), for instance, became a regular contributor of melodramatic and sentimental poetry to one of the more successful regional publications that emerged in the period, Ben Brierley's Journal, which was published and widely distributed in Manchester in the 1870s and 1880s.⁴

The daughter of Ellen Forrester (d. 1883), a poet and Fenian activist who had served time in prison and later emigrated to the United States, Fanny Forrester's own response to the crisis engulfing nineteenth-century Ireland emerges in quite another way, through poems of exile and alienation. An example of such poems is the three-part sequence "Strangers in the City," which documents the arrival, homelessness, and lack of resources, severe working, and living conditions and consequent premature death of Mary, a "timid fawn" exiled from her native land, along with her mother, following a brutal land eviction that has either claimed the lives of her father and sister or at least split the family. This is serious material, but because it is cast in terms of sentimental melodrama, it may not evince a very serious response. The poem seems to the modern reader emotionally overladen, as may be seen in this description of Mary at her factory work, from the second part of the poem "Toiling in the City:"

O'er her work, from morn till evening, bends her sweet and saintly face, But her busy hands oft tremble...