An Alternate Poetics: Working-Class Women Poets and a "People's Tradition"

An Alternate Poetics:Working-Class Women Poets and a "People's Tradition" Florence Boos (bio) Inevitably the term poetess carries an appeal to education and social class, without which neither gentility nor resistance to its norms could exist. Neither can one oversimplify an alternate Victorian working-class women's poetics, since the many dozens of working-class women whose [End Page 162] poems appeared in print during this period differed vastly in class status. These ranged from scarcely literate rural poets, such as Jane Stevenson and Elizabeth Campbell, to widely influential "people's poets," such as Eliza Cook, who, although a brazier's daughter, rose to edit an influential Victorian journal (see Boos). Among the issues that bear on the relationship of working-class women poets to their more well-favoured "sisters," however, are three that merit special notice. 1. Which authors and poetic traditions did Victorian working-class women seek to emulate? Richard Altick, Martha Vicinus, and others have noted that the high cost of books and even periodicals aimed at middle-class Victorians limited working-class engagement with contemporary authors. And although Mechanics Institutes and other libraries became slowly available to men after 1823, these repositories were less hospitable to women. The testimonies of the few women working-class poets who left records of their reading confirm these observations. Instead, women poets found models in an amalgam of ballad and oral traditions, poems in Chartist and worker-sympathetic newspapers such as The Northern Star and Ben Brierley's Journal, and, in some cases, works from an older, formal tradition, including Shakespeare, Milton, and eighteenth-century poets such as Robert Burns and Thomas Gray. Only a few working-class women poets have left records of their reading habits,1 and noticeably missing from these accounts are named women poets—not only mid-Victorian contemporaries Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Augusta Webster, but even older or regional poets, such as Johanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Landon, or Susannah Blamire, "The Cumberland Muse." Largely deprived of a tradition of foremothers or classical antecedents, therefore, Victorian working-class women sought to emulate an older, male-authored (or in the case of ballads, anonymous) tradition, but also to infuse this legacy with new, often more women-centred themes based on familiar experiences. 2. How do women poets from different social backgrounds engage with poetic traditions? As we have seen, Elizabeth Campbell is an example of an entirely proletarian poet without extensive prior models; as with many self-taught poets, her verses resemble declamations devoid of formalized rhythms. At times these fall into blank verse, as in her anguished "The Crimean War": "I weep for all those that in battle are slain; / I've a tear and a prayer for the souls of all men" (Poems 24). Village poet Janet Hamilton reworked Burnsian satire and narrative ballad traditions for her own purposes; the most original instances of the latter are several "ballads of memorie"—accounts in ballad metre of actual events witnessed by the author or her family, but otherwise too humble for formal record.2 A significant number of poems concern [End Page 163] deserted unwed mothers, perhaps reflecting the fate of one of Hamilton's own daughters,3 and alcoholic and violent husbands are a frequent bane. Mancunian region factory poets Marie and Fanny Forrester, informed by a more sophisticated Chartist tradition of labour poetry as exemplified in the Northern Star, Ben Brierley's Journal, and the Leicester Mercury, carve out an honoured role for the "lowly bard." Marie's twin themes are the moral power of labour and the special grace of poetic vision, as she experiences it.4 More concretely, Fanny Forrester celebrates the unique ability of the working-class poet to witness the heroisms of those (in Mary Smith's words) "forgot e'en by tradition's garrulous tongue" (72). Since she or he alone (the gender here is not significant) "tunes his lyre within the garret lonely," her mission is to memorialize the courage and sorrows of the marginalized underclass.5 And at the upper end of the social scale is Eliza Cook, whose verses engage the works of mainstream writers. "Our Father" responds to the...

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