John Goodridge

Over 100 poets of labouring class origin were published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were hugely popular and important in their day but few are available today. This is a collection of some of those poems from the 19th century.

Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets Vol 2

Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.

Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

William Christmas

Poets of labouring class origin were published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were popular and important in their day but few are available today. This is a collection of some of those poems from the 18th century.

Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets

Michael White

John Clare

Alan G. Hill

Edward Strickland

Valerie Pedlar

Mary Moyse

David Powell 

John F. Wyatt

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

John Clare Society Journal, 8 (1989)

Bridget Keegan

Simon White

This collection includes essays that consider how Bloomfield's poetry contributes to an understanding of the predominant issues, forms, and themes of literary Romanticism.

Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon

Robert Bloomfield

John Clare (1793–1864) is one of the most sensitive poetic observers of the natural world. Born into a rural labouring family, he felt connected to two communities: his native village and the Romantic and earlier poets who inspired him. The first part of this study of Clare and community shows how Clare absorbed and responded to his reading of a selection of poets including Chatterton, Bloomfield, Gray and Keats, revealing just how serious the process of self-education was to his development. The second part shows how he combined this reading with the oral folk-culture he was steeped in, to create an unrivalled poetic record of a rural culture during the period of enclosure, and the painful transition to the modern world. In his lifelong engagement with rural and literary life, Clare understood the limitations as well as the strengths in communities, the pleasures as well as the horrors of isolation.

John Clare and Community

Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets Vol 3

R. K. R. Thornton

John Clare was reputedly a solitary, shy man, at one with nature and the world. Although these authors have both published books which indicate otherwise, in this volume they focus on Clare as a transgressive figure. While he documented and celebrated the country life he valued so highly, he was also a witness to the partial destruction of that life, with the coming of enclosure and increasingly severe penalties for trespass. John Clare: The Trespasser shows how, in his poetry, autobiography and letters, Clare was no supporter or respecter of property rights.

The Tresspasser

A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.

John Goodridge

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