The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 by William J. Christmas (review)

77 the first volume of the review copy was misbound, so that pp. xiii–xiv came after pp. xv–xvi, and the ‘‘Acknowledgments’’ ended up in the middle of the first issue of the Journal. We can only hope that years from now the misbinding willmake this copy worth even more than the exorbitant purchase price. Melvyn New University of Florida WILLIAM J. CHRISTMAS. The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730– 1830. Newark and London: Delaware and Associated University Presses, 2001. Pp. 364. $55. Although their works are largely neglected , the English laboring-class poets themselves have received intense scrutiny . Over-read as much as under-read, their stories have always been freighted with ideological baggage of one sort or another. In the eighteenth century, they were mocked by satirists from the Scriblerians onwards, fetishizedbyadvocates of ‘‘natural genius,’’ and equally condemned (bad examples for honest artisans ) and praised (conscientious models for self-improvement). Mr. Christmas’s excellent new study emphasizes that honesty , industry, and piety were their entrance ticket into literary publication, and they were often used in an exemplary fashion by publishers, patrons, and critics . Yet many of them had serious aspirations as poets, and some had talent, as the recent inclusion of Leapor, Yearsley, and the ‘‘Labor’’ poems of Duck and Collier in university English syllabusesacknowledges . These now familiar names join a wider circle, including the bricklayerpoet patronized by Lord Chesterfield, Henry Jones, a fascinating case study in laboring-class Parnassian ambition. Duck is set among his predecessors and his imitators; and mid-to-late eighteenth century poets are bookended by two witty maidservants, Leapor and Elizabeth Hands. A final chapter on the notorious dispute between Ann Yearsley and Hannah More and an equally valuable Epilogue on ‘‘Bloomfield, Clare and the Plebeian tradition,’’ show the ways in which laboring-class poetry was transformed in the Romantic period. This study represents an advance on earlier work on the subject, from Robert Southey, Rayner Unwin, Donna Landry, and others, in that it broadens the canon of laboring-class poets, represents both genders adequately, resists the habit (in Southey and Unwin) of dismissivenessor patronizing approbation, and generally offers an intelligent contextualization of these poets, and a sense of their emergence as a developing tradition in the eighteenth century, linked to changes in education and the literary marketplace. It is underpinned by an attention to detail and a scholarly thoroughness that complements the larger arguments and overviews well. Mr. Christmas is very good at appraising current scholarship on the subject, as well as making his own contributions . My one bibliographical quibble relates to James Woodhouse’s wonderful autobiographical account of the laboringclass poet’s lot, The Life and Lucubrations of Martinus Crispinus, which is discussed (like so much else in this book) with a seriousness and depth it has certainly never received before. There is confusion over when and how Crispinus was published. A note on p. 325 says 1814 and 1816, but it is implied that these were incomplete or bowdlerised. The text at p. 186 says that it was not published in full until 1896, on p. 203 that it was fi- 78 nally ‘‘publishable in 1896’’ and on p. 209 that Woodhouse had ‘‘suppressed’’ the poem, ‘‘in particular those sections of the poem chronicling plebeian servitude, upper-class oppression, and his own version of religious and moral truth.’’ How was it ‘‘suppressed’’? The author says he cannot find a copy of the 1816 edition, which is fair enough, butitwouldbehelpful to know what is in the 1814 version, and why this might not represent a ‘‘true’’ publication, especially if this text is, as he argues, ‘‘one of the most important literary records of plebeian social and ideological critique of the late eighteenth century.’’ But this is a most welcome and useful book, a giant step forward for the study of the laboring-class poets, and a handsome replacement for Rayner Unwin’s fifty-year old study The Rural Muse, as the standard account of these poets. John Goodridge Nottingham Trent University RICHARD GRASSBY. Kinship and Capitalism : Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580– 1740. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001. Pp. 505...