Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Victorian Autobiography - Nan Hackett (essay date summer 1989)

Nan Hackett (essay date summer 1989)

SOURCE: Hackett, Nan. “A Different Form of ‘Self’: Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-class Autobiography.” Biography 12, no. 3 (summer 1989): 208-26.

[In the following essay, Hackett emphasizes the didactic and socially critical functions of narrative in British working-class autobiography of the nineteenth century.]

Francis Russell Hart noted that “Memoir is the autobiography of survival,”¹ yet working-class autobiographers' techniques of survival have caused their works to be ignored as literary works; they have been left to historians for use as documents of social history. John Burnett and David Vincent², singly and now together, have written about British nineteenth-century working-class autobiography. Their scholarship has been responsible for the retrieval of many interesting books; their introductions discuss how childhood, courtship,...

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