John Goodridge

The Newspaper Press and the Victorian Working Class Poet

The relationship between the aspiring working-class poet and the newspaper press has always been crucial. Indeed, it is possible to argue that at least from the late eighteenth century onwards, every laboring-class or working-class poet had a significant relationship with the press. In the case of many, like Robert Burns, the relationship was vexed. As Lucyle Werkmeister’s detailed studies have shown, Burns sent a number of poems to London and local newspapers in the late 1780s and 1790s, both pseudonymously and under his own name, and developed relationships with editors like Peter Stuart of the London Star. “I would scorn to put my name to a Newspaper Poem,” he wrote to one friend; yet, in a letter to Stuart in the same week, he observed that “I am charmed with your paper. I wish it was more in my power to contribute to it” and gave Stuart license to do what he wished with the poems Burns sent him, short of publishing Burns’s name with them (Burns 405, 407). Burns valued the press for its publication of political poems, though as a government employee, he had to be cautious, running into trouble when satirical poems on Establishment figures were wrongly attributed to him, or when editors were unable to resist adding his name to his own satires (see Werkmeister). John Clare, as Eric Robinson has shown, was also an avid reader of and contributor to the newspaper press, local and national, though the extent of his contributions has still not been fully traced. Burns and Clare, who was supported and championed by the London Morning Post, had a status that entitled them to consideration by the London papers. As the press expanded and expanded again in the course of the nineteenth century, however, and as the rise of literacy and the prior reputation of poets like Burns increased the number of would-be working-class poets, the primary relationship tended to be between a working-class poet and one or more of their local newspapers.

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

narrative allows also for the presentation of a large cast of characters, some holding relatively minor roles, as well as the changes in this cast across time. But, again, it takes a reader with special interests to be absorbed by the narrative—which in terms of style is overall well written, if also too infused with British establishment nomenclature. It is a sign of the book’s stubbornly colourless subjectmatter that little of interest disturbed the Anglo–Greek relationship during 1970 and 1971, while the more eventful 1973 and 1974 were met by a wait-and-see British attitude, thus again rendering the relationship unexciting. As a result, the narratives of 1973 and 1974 are about watching storms, while those of 1970 and 1971 are about storms in teacups. Eschewing a meta-narrative—critical, reflexive or otherwise—the author resorts to presenting information that ultimately illuminates the details of the relationship but not the bigger issues surrounding that relationship. We learn, for example, of the (pseudoscientific) hypothesis advanced by a UK ambassador to Athens about crises in Cyprus coming at four-year intervals, but learn hardly anything about Cypriot politics, their regional significance, or the stakes they presented to Greece and the UK. But then again, for those with expertise, it is the details that are the most interesting. While the British accommodation of the dictators may come as no surprise to them, some of them (and I would dare say, many of them in Greece) may be surprised to find that the details of the record show members of the British establishment (including Tories) who disliked the dictators and wished their demise.

Labouring-Class Poetry

The study of labouring-class poetry began for me with the excitement of discovery, first via an association copy of Chatterton’s Rowley Poems inherited from a great-grandfather (see Goodridge 2004), then as a belatedly precocious mature student, happy to discover my own new poets from the past with a little help from my patient lecturers. Taking my cue from E. P. Thompson (as above), I began to focus on the “rescue” of what Brian Maidment in his 1987 anthology would term “self-taught” poets. Seeming support for this endeavour came with the founding of the John Clare Society in 1981 and the growing richness of Clare scholarship and, perhaps most of all, from Roger Lonsdale’s two landmark anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry (1984 and 1989). I was struck not only by the exceptionally rich content of these two volumes — food for decades of reading and teaching — but also by the revolutionary implications of Lonsdale’s concise, scholarly introduction to his New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984). Beginning with the sober statement that we seem to know eighteenth-century poetry pretty well, Lonsdale swiftly unpicked the then familiar consensus, showing us how little the corpus of eighteenth-century poetry had been sifted, and how scholarship had returned again and again to the same “familiar material” and the “most respectable and predictable genres, which are guaranteed to offer few or no surprises.”