[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, domestic life, education and work are presented in hundreds of autobiographies. However, their conclusions are drawn primarily from the content of the works. These historians use the autobiographies as social history artifacts rather than treating them as literary documents, and the scholarship remains social history, not literary or rhetorical analysis.

One can understand why literary critics have ignored these autobiographies; they appear to be simple, straightforward accounts, written by people with minimal understanding of literary devices. British nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies are similar to many American autobiographies, especially slave narratives and works by political dissidents and members of minority groups. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith, Michael G. Cooke, and Elizabeth Schultz have stated,³ the desire to inform an outside group about an unfamiliar segment of society first justifies and then frequently subsumes the story of the individual. He or she no longer tells his or her own private story, but rather relates the story of a group of people, and, in Albert Stone's terms, these works become cultural narratives rather than individual stories.⁴

Like the slave narrative, the working-class autobiography was primarily “testimonial”; its purpose was to document a way of life, promote a set of convictions and show an awareness of audience. Far from a “metaphor of the self,”⁵ to use a term by a critic who emphasizes the literary aspects of this genre, nineteenth-century British working-class autobiography did not stress self-discovery or the literary presentation of a unique individual. The autobiographers who wrote early in the century such as John Clare, the farm-laborer poet, and Charles Campbell, a condemned murderer, knew that they were unusual members of their class, and their autobiographies in some ways reflect their uniqueness. The autobiographies that followed were written by unusual men also, but these men, Francis Place, Thomas Carter, Timothy Claxton and others, tried to minimize their differences from fellow workers. Benjamin Franklin's friend, Benjamin Vaughn, wrote that Franklin's autobiography was not just one man's life story, but the narrative of a “rising people,” the growing ranks of self-educated members of the working class who wanted to rise above their “original station,” an English as well as American dream. Also, to bolster the assumption that his success could prove the worth of his class, as well as of himself, the British Benjamin Franklin minimized his own individual characteristics, making himself as much as possible a representative of his class.

Class consciousness, as Georg Lukacs⁶ claims, is difficult to define but essential to discuss. He points out that awareness of one's class frequently interferes with one's ability to remain a member of that class. Nineteenth-century British workers, although not Marxists, were aware of that ambiguity. They seemed removed to a class of their own, alienated from their uneducated peers and accused of being co-opted by middle-class value systems while not accepted into the other classes, either. Born to working parents and seemingly predestined to a life of labor without education or advancement, with few exceptions, these writers rewrote their lives. Through struggle and sacrifice, they left their jobs as miners, cobblers, stone masons and farm laborers to follow careers as journalists, engineers, shop owners and teachers—in effect, changing their class standing. Yet they insisted on identifying themselves as members of the working class, no matter what later success or wealth they enjoyed. Although part of this may be due to the feeling that one's status is affected by the social standing of one's parents, it is also a conscious decision to remain part of the working class.

Despite their loyalty, these workers recognized at another level that they had changed their class affiliation. The change occurred not when they took white collar jobs or accumulated capital but when they chose to teach themselves to read or to learn Latin on Sundays or to study mathematics while repairing shoes or go to lectures on chemistry at the Mechanics' Institute rather than to a tavern in the evenings. They were estranged from coworkers, neighbors, earlier friends and even family members. Thomas Carter, a rather unpleasant man, whines at the teasing he received from his colleagues who preferred to drink rather than read during their lunch break. On the other hand, Alexander Somerville, an unskilled laborer, felt the cruelest treatment he received was from the skilled mechanics who refused to let him use the library at their institute. Later in the century, as unions grew and the autobiographers were more likely to study political activism than Greek tragedy and algebra, they did not feel as distanced from the rest of their class. However, like the self-educated men early in the century who were cut off from fellow workers and the few in the last decades who wrote sentimental stories of honest hard work untainted by political concerns, all these autobiographers continued to describe themselves as members of the working class and to argue for political rights and decent living conditions for their fellow workers. Despite their consciousness of social estrangement, they chose to identify themselves with the least educated and least distinctive of their fellow workers and considered themselves as part of the “great unwashed” or the “new masters.”

Therefore, even in this very personal, subjective, and supposedly egocentric genre, the “I” is minimized and even depersonalized. Bill, the Anonymous Navvy, whose story was featured in MacMillan's Magazine, begins his narrative by stating, “There was a wonderful large family of us—eleven was born, but we died down to six.”⁷ Death was, of course, a common occurrence in nineteenth-century families, but such a bald, unemotional, detached statement of five deaths in a single family is not found outside working-class autobiography. Like Bill's simple statement, most working-class autobiography consists of an impersonal chronology with little or no dramatic narrative or introspection. Rather than interpreting such characteristics as defects, we should look at what these autobiographies have to offer: an alternative form of self-presentation, acceptable to an unenfranchised and economically, educationally and socially deprived class of people.

As the nineteenth-century British working class struggled for recognition, political viability and social reform, its autobiographers did not luxuriate in confessional, introspective and highly literary autobiographies. Because working-class autobiography was primarily didactic, an elaborate narrative of one's life could seem affected. When the autobiographer initially determined what stories to relate, he or she did not first consider aesthetic presentation or the psychological consistency of his “characters.” Instead, his primary concerns were the utility and possible political consequences of his illustrations. Therefore, the narratives tended to be short and simple preludes to the real “substance” of the book, and the descriptions of the autobiographer and other persons in his tale can seem poorly or inconsistently developed.

Working-class autobiographers justified their excursion into a literary genre by claiming they wrote social history. Certainly, members of the London Corresponding Society, Chartists and other reformers were writing histories as well as autobiographies. Because the offical press and historians were usually hostile to working-class propaganda, political activists such as William Lovett, Thomas Cooper, Francis Place and Thomas Hardy used their autobiographies to record their opinions on contemporary politics. They knew that their viewpoints and even the events in which they had participated would otherwise go unrecorded, and they therefore added meticulously detailed historical narratives, frequently backed up with quotation from other sources. For example, Samuel Bamford devotes seven chapters to a careful account of what he saw and did at the “Peterloo” rally on Monday, August 6, 1819, and also appends his wife's recollection of the same day. He repeatedly uses court documents and depositions to support his own account, even though this material disrupts the narrative. William Lovett similarly bolsters his narrative through quotation from official papers until his autobiography seems to be a string of loosely-bound minutes, pamphlets and court records. When imprisoned, for example, he does not directly describe his cell or recall his dismay at losing his freedom, but instead reproduces at length a petition in which he had protested the unfit condition of his cell and the harsh treatment he received. Although Lovett was an important actor in nineteenth-century radical politics, as an autobiographer he often seems a passive recorder.

Interestingly, for more fully-developed narratives which are less distanced by documentation, one must examine more general presentations of working-class culture rather than recitations of historical events in which the author participated. As an example, compare Bamford's first autobiography, Passages in the Life of a Radical, which details his involvement with the protest at St. Peter's Field and his subsequent arrest, to his second autobiography, Early Days, in which he discussed his childhood. Although the reader learns about Bamford's early years, first in a Manchester workhouse managed by his father and then at his aunt's home in Middleton, where he became a spinner, personal reminiscences are not the central feature of this book. By chapter three, Bamford abandons his personal narrative for a three-chapter digression. He first takes the reader on a walking tour of Middleton as it was in the late eighteenth century, and later recounts all the seasonal village festivals, such as Rushbearing, Midlent Sunday and Guy Fawkes Day. He justifies this three-chapter digression by noting that this simple village life was becoming extinct in the midst of growing industrialism and destitution. He fears that not even the working class, much less the classes who had ignored the existence of the laborers, could remember rural pleasures, such as an evening spent before the fireplace, roasting apples and telling ghost stories.

No doubt most autobiographers believe it is necessary to give the flavor of their childhoods, especially those who consider theirs unusual; hence, all tell stories of childhood games or special holidays and describe the environment in detail. However, Bamford frequently does not place himself in the scenes he creates. He does not make himself one of the young people gathering rushes to decorate the church, nor does he recall any pranks that he played on “Mischief-neet.” He seems an invisible observer, until recollections of All Souls' Night lead him into relating his aunt's ghost stories, and the chapter concludes with a long account of when Aunt Elizabeth met the spirit of Bamford's dead mother. Aunt Elizabeth is a talented storyteller, and Bamford recreates Lancashire dialect as she tells how she gossiped, quoted from the Bible and argued with her husband on the night that Hannah Bamford supposedly returned to Middleton to reassure her friends of her contentment in the spiritual world. The young listener interrupts occasionally, also in dialect, to ask for more information.

At the close of the narrative, however, the boy suddenly begins to reflect in standard English on what he has heard. From dialect exclamations such as “I'th' name o' Goodness, aint, what aryo tellin' me,” his speech changes abruptly to

Yes, but I do when the rabble are away—when nothing is heard save the distant murmurs from the surrounding habitation. There is something so quaintly hoary in the old Summer house, and the tall trees waving in the mysterious twilight just before dark, that I feel as if I were almost in a new existence.⁸

Possibly learning that his beloved mother could return to earth could startle a young boy into unexpected thoughtfulness, and to the twentieth-century reader, the latinate style and Romantic notions may seem humorous, but the linguistic change reflects a problem in presentation for working-class autobiographers.

For the working-class autobiographer, the difficulty of how to represent the speech of members of his or her class is compounded by literary convention. Although Robert Burns had demonstrated that serious poetry could be written in dialect, in the theatre and in Gothic novels servants' speech had long been exclusively used for humor. Therefore, if the working-class autobiographer wished to be scrupulous about presenting the characteristic speech of his background, he also ran the risk of being dismissed as comic or vulgar. Autobiographers dealt with this dilemma in various ways. Several of the autobiographers discuss their difficulties in learning to speak standard English, and remark that their families, friends, and, especially, other workers were suspicious of their changed speech habits. Bamford and Alexander Somerville are inconsistent in their use of representative speech; they switch from dialect to standard English abruptly, nearly from one sentence to the next. By contrast, Thomas Cooper reports all conversation in standard English, regardless of who is speaking. Others quote their neighbors as speaking in broad dialect but will present themselves and perhaps their mothers as speaking formally. A few, such as James Burn, Christopher Thomson and Charles Manby Smith, and an increasing number of late-century authors began to play with dialects, and more generally with language; perhaps it was this linguistic play that made Burn's The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy a Victorian bestseller. However, even Burn quotes others as speaking in dialect, such as the Northern farmer who thought Burn “had run awa' frae me place, ‘saying it was an unca like thing to see a laddie like me stravaging about the kintra on the Sabbath-day; he was shere I belanged to somebody, and it was a pity, for I was a weel-faured callant, he wad warrant I was hungry’” (italics his)⁹ and does not directly quote himself. Instead he shows his ability to play with standard English, as in the following example, where he also demonstrates his familiarity with Shakespeare and French.

The shoes were so capacious that, with a little enlargement, and a Siamese union, I might have gone on a voyage of discovery in them! The chapeau, instead of being a fit, was an extinguisher, and I when I put it on I required to bid the world good night! The longitude of the trowsers was of such a character that I could not find my bearings in them and the coat was of such ample dimensions that if I had had a family it would have made a cover for the whole of us. I dare say you have some idea how an ordinary sized man requires to be made up for the representation of Sir John Falstaff: my case was somewhat similar. The hat was flattered to remain on my head by being padded to such an extent that it looked like a capital accidentally placed on the wrong pillar, and I was obliged to hold my head as if I was balancing a pole on the top of it. The coat required two or three others as companions to keep it from collapsing and burying me in its folds; and the trowsers put me in mind of two respectable towns in France, being Too-loose and Too-long! (italics his)¹⁰

But most autobiographers, among them William Lovett, Hugh Miller and Charles Shaw, avoid the problem by omitting dialogue from their books.

Obviously, excising dialogue from a narrative removes some of its potential immediacy. In fact, the narratives of these autobiographers seem remarkable static. In working-class autobiography, the scene may be as meticulously drawn and as fully detailed as George Bernard Shaw's description of the characters and stage before the curtain rises on one of his plays, but in these autobiographies, the action never starts. For example, Francis Place shows amazing recall of the most trivial details; he even drew a diagram of his family's lodgings. Not only does he describe the general layout of nearly every apartment the Places ever rented in their nomadic life, but he itemizes the location and origin of nearly every piece of furniture they purchased. Alexander Somerville's equally meticulous listing of meagre meals, tattered clothing, and inadequate housing emphasizes the difficulty with which these necessary items were procured. To a moving extent, these authors prove the converse of the old saying, “Easily gotten, soon forgotten”; years later, they can still recall in vivid detail every precious item, especially books, which they had possessed. Grim living conditions made an equally lasting impression, as in Somerville's description of his first home, a laborer's shed

about twelve feet by fourteen, and not so high in the walls as will allow a man to get in without stooping. That place without ceiling, or anything beneath the bare tiles of the roof; without a floor save the common clay; without a cupboard or recess of any kind; with no grate but the iron bars which the tenants carried to it, built up and took away when they left it; with no window save four small panes on one side,—it was this house, still a hind's house at Springfield, for which, to obtain leave to live in, my mother sheared the harvest and carried the stacks.

How eight children and father and mother were huddled in that place is not easily told.¹¹

In many of their narratives, there seems to be no plot, dialogue nor action; instead, there is an abundance of visual detail. The scene is set, but nothing happens.

Notice that in the excerpt quoted above, Somerville does not speak of himself but instead describes his mother, father and their eight children. Although Thomas Hardy is the only autobiographer who chose to write his entire autobiography in the third person, many autobiographers slip into a more distanced stance when describing past abuses. Charles Shaw, describing child labor in the pottery works, frequently speaks of “the poor child” and when he uses “I” he usually quickly tacks on “and others.” The twelve-year-old John Wilson nursed his father during a fatal bout of cholera, and he describes the scene in an interesting mixture of pathos and moral rectitude. Although the first person is used at the beginning of the narrative, in his account of his father's death-throes and funeral he refers merely to “the father” and “the son” or “the orphan.” Again, this device points up the representational aspect of working-class autobiography. Shaw is not telling the reader about his particular experiences, but is describing child labor and the horrific working conditions at the Tunstall potteries for all its workers, child and adult, male and female. John Wilson feels that he is giving the necessary background to explain the need for miners' unions and social legislation rather than asking for the reader's sympathy for the newly-orphaned boy. In his autobiography, Wilson admits that he is much more comfortable using the third person, and one senses that nearly all working-class autobiographers could have said the same.

In addition to quoting outside sources, creating pictures, and speaking in the third person, working-class autobiographers frequently withhold information necessary for the completion of the narrative. Joseph Gutteridge provides the most startling example of an author who leaves a story unfinished. He begins by describing the winter of 1892-3, when he and his wife were both ill and unemployed for nearly ten weeks. Noting that he endured this difficult period by remembering his past happiness when collecting natural history specimens, he then spends several paragraphs describing land and marine shells but never returns to his account of the harsh winter. Because, as the autobiography continues, the reader learns that Gutteridge lived to be seventy-seven years old, the reader assumes he and perhaps also his wife survived that harsh time, but he never mentions the winter of 1893 again. No other working-class autobiographer leaves a narrative so unfinished, but many abruptly turn from painful remembrances to edifying discussions about the necessity for political and/or moral reform. They also frequently use an edifying sermon to close the autobiography itself.

Not only do these autobiographers often provide abrupt endings to stories within their books, they also show minimal concern for transitions, formal openings or self-conscious framing of incidents. Many of the latter are introduced plainly as stories to tell. For example, as a preface to a humorous story set in magistrates' court, James Burn simply wrote “The following anecdote will give a very fair idea of the town.” Lovett, too, opens a series of narratives with the bald claim that the anecdotes which follow are presented merely to indicate his character in childhood. Timothy Claxton begins his autobiographical sketch, Hints to Mechanics on Self-Education and Mutual Instruction, by claiming that every incident is told for its utility, and that hidden within them any reader should find plenty of “hints” for his own life. Thomas Carter debates the necessity of including various childhood reminiscences, but again justifies these, as he defends his entire narrative, by claiming that they illustrate how a working man should be encouraged to study. Joseph Barker explains that he included a story about his grief over a butterfly's death as a refutation of the doctrine of original sin. Although the author may provide only a brief notice of the purpose for relating an incident, the moral implications of the narrative are never left to the reader's inference. Instead, they are usually so blatantly stated that no reader could miss the moral of the story.

Narratives are thus only included when they exemplify character traits, describe working-class culture, or create a pathetic scene for a persuasive purpose. The desire on the part of these autobiographers to persuade through pathos may seem counter to their practice of distancing themselves from the story through the use of third person, narrative interruptions and external documentation. However, these scenes of pathos are similarly distanced by the authors' plea for compassion for others rather than themselves. Despite the death of several members of his family in a typhus epidemic and the necessity of helping his aunt with her spinning at an early age, Samuel Bamford led a relatively happy and carefree life. As a result, his Passages in the Life of a Radical asks for pity, not for himself, but for other working people. He tells several affecting narratives about destitute people whom he had met, especially while fleeing arrest and then traveling to London for his trial. One particularly pathetic scene happens in a public house, when a “personally fine looking woman” entered the inn to beg for assistance. Her husband, a weaver, was ill from overwork, her children had contracted measles, they had no food in the house, and they could get no credit from the grocer. The woman, dressed in extremely clean although darned clothing and feeding an infant at her breast, fainted when offered a drink of ale and was thought dead. The overseer, fearing an inquest, repeatedly insisted that since he had offered her two shillings, he could not be held responsible. The heartless, cowardly overseer, the pale, beautiful woman, and the infant at its mother's breast are all standard ingredients in Victorian melodrama. Bamford's recitation is a set piece, begging for pity for the deserving poor, not for a political dissident, or an adult man presumably capable of caring for himself.

What seems less like the standard fare for melodrama is Thomas Cooper's account of the first Chartist meeting he attended. Cooper carefully describes the scene and quotes the words of the main speaker, which were greeted with a few shouted “Hear, hears”; after Cooper leaves the excited meeting at eleven at night he is surprised to hear the creak and whir of stocking looms, and he asks some weavers about this seeming prosperity—enough work that some weave late into the night. Cooper strings the reader along, as he asks naive questions and his informants laconically state the facts. The weavers earn “4 and 6,” they say; Cooper multiplies this sum by the six workdays and decides that it is a good wage. No, his informers answer, the weavers earned four shillings and sixpence a week. The masters also demand framerents and then additional money for keeping frames in the shop and the weavers must pay to receive orders from the master, to hire a “seamer,” and to buy oil and candles by which to work. When work becomes scarce, it is spread out among all the weavers. Cooper asks his audience if that does not seem reasonable, but then reminds the reader that all the stocking-weavers must still pay full frame-rent and other expenses even when receiving a fraction of their pay. Cooper then describes other troubles the weavers face, such as delays in getting orders, and necessary alterations to the frames that require at least a day's work without pay. Through judicious use of dialogue, ironic presentation of his own supposed naivete, appeals to the reader, and laconic statement of the horrific facts, Cooper presents a piteous and affecting tale. However, at the time of this account, Cooper was not a stocking-weaver but a newspaper reporter embarking on his Chartist career. He tells the plight of the stocking-weavers not to present his own circumstances, but to explain the abuses which persuaded a quiet, literary-minded shoemaker to become a political radical.

Cooper explains his political conversion fairly convincingly as the result of his perception of the destitution of others, but other working-class autobiographers fail to explain their motives. If narratives are static, oriented towards others, and utilitarian or inspirational, it is easy for the autobiographer or “central character” of the work to seem slighted, not fully developed, and even inconsistent. Most of these men began life in villages. Their parents were all hard-working, honest, and poor; a few valued education, but most seem to have been typical representatives of the working class, and they were not politically active or rebellious. Most could not read or write and had not heard of Paine, Hume, or any other political writer. For example, Francis Place does not question why he became the “Radical Tailor of Charing Cross” while his brother seems to have been a sullen laborer all his life. Place merely points out that when in school, he had heeded his teacher's advice, while his brother resented Place's popularity with the master. Place's father wanted to apprentice him to a conveyancer, but for a reason he claims not to know, Place simply refused to study law. When his father offered him to any worker in a public house who would take him, Place, by chance, became a leather breeches-maker. His description of how he became interested in political activism seems equally unanalytical. During eight months of unemployment, he happened to read works by Paine, Hume and Godwin, and became a convinced radical.

Place's discussion of how he became involved in politics is less dramatic than Cooper's, but certainly fuller than Thomas Hardy's or William Lovett's. The latter two claim that their conversions were simply matters of economic necessity and resentment towards government. Bamford avoids an explanation of the development of his dedication to reform by beginning his first autobiography with events in 1816, when he was already politically active, and concluding his second autobiography with 1813, when he was just beginning to settle down and to seriously consider the living conditions of the poor. Only Cooper gives any personal reasons for any political activities or mentions making a conscious decision.

The omission seems even more glaring when the standards of Victorian autobiography are considered. John Stuart Mill's Autobiography and John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua detail their authors' mental and emotional development from early childhood to adult beliefs. The nineteenth century is characterized as a period of doubt and introspection, and in its literature, we see characters question and examine their lives either endlessly or until resolved into a Carlylean apotheosis of duty to one's fellowman. Yet working-class autobiographers are remarkably cautious about confessions of belief, not only political but also religious; frequently they try to sidestep confessions of loss of faith, especially religious, unless followed by discussions of how it was regained.

Like class consciousness, religious feeling is not easily dissected and discussed. The effect of religion on working-class consciousness has been a matter of debate since 1845 when Engels charged in The Condition of the Working Class in England that the state and dissenting churches collaborated in keeping the working classes uneducated by offering a sop of Sunday School reading instruction “vitiated by poisonous dogma.”¹² Later Élie Halévy, in volume one of History of the English People, claimed that the growth of Methodism in the early nineteenth century prevented working-class revolt, a thesis accepted without question by most socialist historians until the last twenty years.¹³ E. P. Thompson attacked Methodism as “psychic exploitation” and the “chiliasm of despair” while dismissing the influence of a class-ridden Church of England. However, in recent years, historians have ameliorated the charges against organized religion and discovered positive forces within the established churches. E. J. Hobsbawm details the influences that Methodism with its camp meeting, pamphletering and enthusiastic preaching had on the methods of radical dissent. Literary critics have also praised Sunday Schools for the rise in literacy, although as Richard Altick, R. K. Webb, Raymond Williams, Amy Cruse and Q. D. Leavis admit, the growing interest in reading had a variety of causes including workingmen's mutual instruction societies, the rise of labor unions, the shortening of the working day, additional factory legislation curtailing the employment of children and requiring them to attend school halfdays, prison reform, the Society for the Distribution of Useful Knowledge and other sources of inexpensive publications, and perhaps the most influential, the repeal of the Stamp Act. Additionally, most Victorian scholars agree that although the majority of the working class was not hostile to church or chapel, they did not regularly attend church or Sunday School. It seems that laborers held a sort of pragmatic agnosticism. Little concerned with any religious association's doctrine, they were more likely to base their decisions about attending on the distance to the church, the necessity of proper dress, the attitude of the clergy towards the poor and the possibility of receiving free food or other aid.¹⁴

The least educated, ambitious and political among the working-class autobiographers generally mention church as possessing more a pragmatic than a religious function in their lives. Bill, the Anonymous Navvy, untouched by his mother's piety in his youth, was eventually influenced by sermons given by the Church of England pastor officiating at the prison. Grace Foakes and her sister, growing up in London's East End tenements, went to Sunday School because they were allowed to take the leftover food from tea home for their family's Monday dinner. Although both writers believed in a Christian God, there was no sense of loyalty to a particular dogma or religious service. For example, George Lansbury's Methodist mother directed her sons to the nearby Anglican church on Sundays unless they had been especially troublesome, when they were sent to chapel.

Much of the working class claimed the state church as their church and might use the church for weddings and burials, but also saw it as an extension of the government and therefore as remote from them and as class-ridden as was Parliament. Several discuss their distaste at having to sit in the charity pews. Not one claims to be close to any church functionary, not even those at the lowest levels. Therefore, it is not surprising that although they identify themselves as believers, they do not see the Church of England as serving an important function in their lives. Many workers were anticlerical or critical of certain Anglican policies, but, with the exception of Francis Place, the autobiographers were not outspoken atheists.

In contrast to the pragmatists mentioned above, autobiographers who belonged to Dissenting churches discuss how their religious beliefs and associations permeated every aspect of their lives. Thomas Cooper's mother brought up her son in the Methodist religion even though her Methodism made her ineligible for parish relief when she was widowed. Young Cooper was very active in the church but eventually wanted to use Sundays to study literature, mathematics and languages rather than devote his study exclusively to the Bible. This brought him into sharp conflict with his Methodist brethren. Throughout his life, he maintained an uncomfortable relationship with organized religion as he was faulted for being too worldly and in turn tried not to fault the church for being too narrow-minded and ineffective. Conversion to a sense of personal sin, redemption, and the power of God led to a reconversion to a sense of public sin, political redemption and the power of collective action, and so back and forth for many working-class autobiographers.

Whatever difficulties Cooper and other self-taught men had with organized religion, especially the Methodist church, these writers held to their Christian faith whether or not they could get along with their fellow worshippers. In their wavering associations with organized religion, we can see contemporary scholars' debate over the influence of the church, especially Methodism. Cooper and others frequently credited the church's Sunday Schools as a start to their more secular educational pursuits. Their participation as lay preachers prepared them as speakers for the People's Charter or unions or whatever cause they chose to champion later. And, perhaps most importantly, the sense of community or fellowship permeated their later educational, political and economic institutions. However, the refusal of either the Methodist or the Anglican church to support the extension of suffrage or to work openly for the alleviation of the earthly ills of poverty, along with official Wesleyan and Anglican distrust of the possibly insurrectionary influences of secular education caused many working people to feel alienated from the church and chapel. Yet, any reader of working-class autobiography is struck by the abundant Biblical allusion and imagery and the repeated conversion motif that permeates radical rhetoric as well. As Hobsbawm and other English historians have repeatedly noted, the Puritan revolt of the seventeenth century infused British radicalism with a strong dose of religious fervor that remained for centuries.

The wavering over religious belief and church association is common in working-class autobiographers until late in the century. By then the Sea of Faith had shrunk, and loss-of-faith was a standard chapter in autobiographies of all classes; writers could then either present themselves as atheists without lengthy apology or explanation, or they could claim that their individual church affiliations were important only to themselves and not to the reader.

Discretion about religious matters matched discretion about political concerns. David Vincent refers to the self-educated workers as “true freethinkers, in the literal sense of the term.” They may have thought freely but they also knew the price of thinking out loud. Francis Place, an admitted atheist and political activist early in the nineteenth century, wrote how his radical beliefs cost him business and security. His autobiography was not published until 1972, when it was pieced together from a manuscript bowlderized by his son after Place's death. The autobiographies that were published in the nineteenth century were more likely to be by those who repented political activism, especially as part of a religious reawakening; Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke, based loosely on the life of Thomas Cooper, has its hero recant his radicalism for the love of an upper-class woman and the church, not the ending Thomas Cooper lived or wrote about in his autobiography.

However, many published autobiographies do contain recantations of political activity, also as a way of explaining the author's involvement in the first place. James Burn dismisses his involvement with Chartism as a sort of “infectious insanity.” Alexander Somerville, who also repented his political activism, depicted his participation in the 1834 trades' union riots as that of an innocent man deluded by unscrupulous orators. Although these autobiographers tried very hard to present themselves as self-made men who through diligence, hard work, and study tried to improve their conditions, they also recognized that they were easily victimized and controlled, either by inflammatory leaders, or more commonly, by the price of corn or the demand for woven goods. They were self-taught and their successes were self-made but they recognized that they were not entirely self-formed.

At the beginning of the century, members of the working class tended to see themselves as powerless in the face of aristocratic privilege and middle-class capital. By the end of the century, as the unions grew in strength, workers recognized the power of collective action, but individual action seemed more futile than ever. As the autobiographies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor leaders demonstrate by stressing social, political and economic history, no matter how unique an individual was (and men such as Joseph Arch, farm laborer and member of parliament, John Clynes, mill worker and cabinet minister, and George Jacob Holyoake, socialist editor, were highly unusual), they recognized the primary influences on anyone's life were political and economic, and beyond his control. The traditional literary definition of autobiography as a narrative of a “self” seems to run counter to working-class political ideology and assumptions about identity. Similarly, Socialists and Marxists are frequently ill at ease as autobiographers because they must subsume concern for the individual in the good of all, and show themselves, not as unique beings, but as specks within a suprapersonal, political force.

If the autobiographer himself, the “central character” of the work, is not fully developed, it is not surprising that members of the supporting cast seem one-dimensional. At times, they seem romantic characters created to engage the sympathy of the reader, such as the starving young mother Bamford described, or Alexander Somerville's parents. Other characterizations are more picturesque, such as Hugh Miller's description of various Scotch characters. Mad Bell was alternately a pyromaniac who had to be tied up and a logical, well-read woman who discussed philosophy and religion with Miller while he hewed stone.

Often, by contrast, spouses and children receive scant notice in these autobiographies. Working-class autobiographers who wrote in the first two-thirds of the century stressed their virtuous love of home and family, but also admit the burden children placed on working-class incomes. Nearly every autobiographer mentioned felt fear and dread, as well as joy and love, when he first met his wife. Place claimed that his wife became incurably despondent over her many pregnancies, and she feared that they would never be financially secure. As the century progressed, spouses received less and less attention, especially as belief in the centrality of family to their life became gradually supplanted by belief in the shaping influence of wider political and historical forces. Working-class autobiographers usually condensed the story of their married lives into a few paragraphs, which conventionally praised the loyalty and uncomplaining perseverance of their wives. At most, children's birth dates, names, and, all too frequently, deaths were recorded. In some cases, the reader learns about children only when they join their parents' political activities. But even the authors who avoided politics omit discussion of their family life. Thomas Carter lists every book he read, but fails to record his wife's name. Timothy Claxton refers to his wife only in passing when he remarks that after he moved to London, he acquired a “lathe and a wife to assist” him.

In their sometimes dry, depersonalized manner, working-class autobiographers come close to recreating their hard, dehumanized lives as workers in the mill, as mechanized as the machines they ran. The monotony and repetition of their lives were relieved by the colorful customs and holidays of the shared but now endangered village culture, with its intriguing cast of characters, such as Mad Bell and others. To paraphrase Georges Gusdorf, the “style” of the autobiography reflects the “life-style” of the autobiographer.¹⁵ It may be that what has often been dismissed as an absence of style or personal flair may instead be an effective method of indicating the psychological and social effect of economic deprivation as well as a sense of communal consciousness. If these writers lack belief in the centrality of introspection and “self” in their experience, tension automatically exists between the literary conventions of autobiography as confessional narrative or aesthetic recreation of self and the working-class author's belief and experience. However, to the astute and sensitive critic, these autobiographies may be seen as “metaphors” of a different form of self, because of, not in spite of, emphasis on the author's class rather than his personal history or traits. Rather than attracting attention to the artistic rendering of a life, these narratives are powerful and effective efforts to raise the reader's pity and indignation at the lives of the majority of English nineteenth-century working people, and admiration for the courage with which many withstood their fate.

Notes

1. Francis Russell Hart, “History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir.” New Literary History, 11 no. 1 (Autumn 1979), p. 195.

2. See John Burnett, Ed., Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane, 1982; John Burnett, Ed., Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane, 1974; David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Europa Publications, Ltd., 1981; see also Burn and Hardy citations below.

3. See Sidonie Smith, Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974; Michael Cooke, “Modern Black Autobiography in the Tradition.” Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities. Ed. David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973, 255-80; and Elizabeth Schultz, “To Be Black and Blue: The Blues Genre in Black American Autobiography.” The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Albert E. Stone. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981, 109-132.

4. Albert E. Stone, “Introduction: American Autobiographies as Individual Stories and Cultural Narratives.” The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Albert E. Stone. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1981, 1-9.

5. James Olney. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

6. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1971.

7. “Autobiography of a Navvy,” p. 55.

8. Bamford, Early Days, p. 168.

9. Burn, p. 79.

10. Burn, p. 127.

11. Somerville, p. 10.

12. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Ed. and translated by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. New York: MacMillan Co., 1958.

13. Élie Halévy. History of the English People in 1815. Translated by E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1924.

14. See E. J. Hobsbawn, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1964; Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain. London: MacMillan, 1968; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader 1790-1848. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966; Raymond Williams, Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1983; Amy Cruse, The Victorians and their Reading. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936; and Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.

15. Georges Gusdorf. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Translated by James Olney in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Autobiographies Cited

Anonymous. “Autobiography of a Navvy.” MacMillan's Magazine, Vol. VI (December 1861), p. 55.

Arch, Joseph. The Story of His Life Told by Himself. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898.

Bamford, Samuel. Early Days. Ed. W. H. Chaloner. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1976.

Bamford, Samuel. Passages in the Life of a Radical. Vol. I-II. Ed. W. H. Chaloner. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967.

Barker, Joseph. The History and Confessions of a Man. Wortley: J. Barker, 1846.

Burn, James Dawson. The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. Ed. David Vincent. London: Europa Publications, Ltd., 1978.

Campbell, Charles. Memoirs of Charles Campbell. Glasgow: James Duncan & Co., 1828.

Carter, Thomas. Memoirs of Working Man. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845.

Clare, John. Sketches in the Life of John Clare. Ed. Edmond Blunden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1931.

Claxton, Timothy. Hints to Mechanics on Self-Education and Mutual Instruction. London: Taylor & Walton, 1839.

Clynes, John. Memoirs 1869-1924, Volume One. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1937.

Cooper, Thomas. Life of Thomas Cooper. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1872.

Gutteridge, Joseph. The Autobiography of Joseph Gutteridge. Master and Artisan in Victorian England. Ed. Valerie E. Chancellor. New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1969.

Hardy, Thomas. Memoir of Thomas Hardy. Reprinted in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790-1885. Ed. David Vincent. London: Europa Publications, Ltd., 1977.

Holyoake, George Jacob. Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892.

Lansbury, George. My Life. London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1928.

Lovett, William. The Life and Struggles of William Lovett. London: Trubner & Co., 1876.

Manby Smith, Charles. The Working Man's Way in the World, Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer. New York: Redfield, 1854.

Miller, Hugh. My Schools and Schoolmasters. New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1877.

Place, Francis. The Autobiography of Francis Place. Ed. Mary Thale. Cambridge: University Press, 1972.

Shaw, Charles. When I Was a Child (by an Old Potter). London: Methuen, 1903.

Somerville, Alexander. The Autobiography of a Working Man. Ed. John Carswell. London: Turnstile Press, 1951.

Thomson, Christopher. The Autobiography of an Artisan. London: J. Chapman, 1847.

Wilson, John. Memories of a Labour Leader. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910.