Literature by the working class

Cassandra Falke

"By the 1820s, falling book prices and rising literacy rates had created England's first literate working-class majority. These workers had read other people's lives. They had read "the histories of heroes" and "histories of philosophers" as one artisan author puts it, but they looked in vain for an autobiography of a fellow "wealth producer." Those who were born in the 1790s shared a revolutionary generation with Byron, Shelley and Keats, and they had seen their country's industrialization first hand. Their lives were radically different than the lives their parents had lived, and they knew that they had their own stories to tell. Between 1820 and the defeat of Chartism in 1848, forty-eight men and women wrote or spoke their autobiographies, commemorating in their own words the cultural transition that accompanied England's shift to an industrial capitalist economy. The outpouring...