Abstract
This chapter explores poetry written by industrial workers for performance or circulation in the workplace. With a particular focus on poems in praise of employers and on factory excursion poetry, it traces the impact that writing verse could have on an individual’s career prospects, as well as exploring the class and power dynamics at play within this genre of poetry. This kind of working-class poetry has seldom been investigated, but shows the ways in which poetry functioned as part of industrial workplace cultures in the Victorian period.
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Notes
- 1.
Little is known about Morton, though a short biography identifying him as a Galashiels weaver and poet appeared in The Border Counties Magazine, March 1881, p. 116.
- 2.
My allusions here largely come from the findings of the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ project, which was publicly released in 2022 (see www.pistonpenandpress.org/database, consulted 18 February 2022). The Enginorum magazine is held in the archives of the National Railway Museum.
- 3.
For example highly influential studies and collections such as those by Vicinus, Maidment and Sanders do not discuss workplace verse, though they do consider how working-class writers discussed industrial labour, often in terms of their critiques of this labour, or their more politicized poems on strikes, unionism and other collective workers’ enterprises. There is no discussion of the function of the workplace in literary production in the essays contained in Goodridge and Keegan’s major recent collection. Cohen’s substantial and important study of popular verse cultures in nineteenth-century America also does not address workplace verse.
- 4.
Workplace speeches, as preserved in newspaper columns, did not include entire poems unless the poem was original but would often include brief poetic quotations from a wide variety of sources. Longfellow is the most trenchant example of a writer liable to be cited by both workers and masters. See Blair (2021).
- 5.
This is confirmed by Abraham Holroyd’s memories of Heaton, reported in ‘Halifax Books and Authors’ LXXIX, Brighouse News, 30 June 1905, p. 7. Holroyd notes that the poems on the walls were ‘almost perfect in rhythm, but the spelling was that of an illiterate person, and there was not the least attempt at punctuation’.
- 6.
On Nicholson, Wildman and Waddington, see Charles A. Fedener, ‘John Nicholson’, James Gabb, ‘Abraham Wildman’ and A. H. Rix, ‘James Waddington’, in Forshaw 1893, pp. 144–54, pp. 192–3, pp. 185–6. Wildman’s career is further discussed in Blair 2019 (2).
- 7.
‘Walkerburn’, Border Advertiser, 15 July 1870, p. 3.
- 8.
The Penny Post poem is ‘The Agonized Cry of the Heart’, signed ‘J. C., Banks of the Almond’, 19 January 1867.
- 9.
This cites Jacques Rancière’s 2012 preface to Proletarian Nights (1981), p. ix. This study presents complex arguments about the ways in which French artisans deployed time outside work (e.g. pp. 290–1) on ‘dedication’. The different national context and focus on a period largely pre-1850 means that there is no discussion of the kind of strategic, celebratory workers’ literature I discuss here.
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Blair, K. (2023). Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_4
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