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Working-Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Cooper, Thomas, The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872; Leicester, 1971)Google Scholar; Roberts, Stephen, “Thomas Cooper: A Victorian Working Class Writer,” Our History Journal 16 (1990): 1226Google Scholar. See Kingsley, 's fictionalized account of Cooper's life, Alton Locke, tailor and poet: An autobiography (London, 1850)Google Scholar.

2 The most important works include Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Ashraf, Mary, Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1978–79)Google Scholar; Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981)Google Scholar, and Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Maidment, Brian, “Essayists and Artizans—the Making of Victorian Self-Taught Poets,” Literature and History 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 7491Google Scholar, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1987)Google Scholar, and “Class and Cultural Production in the Industrial City,” in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, ed. Kidd, A. J. and Roberts, K. W., (Manchester, 1985), 148–66Google Scholar; Klaus, H. G., The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton, 1985)Google Scholar.

3 Cross, Nigel, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge, 1985), 126Google Scholar.

4 In The Victorian Working-Class Writer (London, 1999), 91, 114–15Google Scholar, Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts point out that a few other working-class individuals, including J. B. Leno and Ben Brierley, managed to make a decent living from literature.

5 Curiously, there is no mention of Frost in either the multivolume Dictionary of Labour Biography or the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but there are some fascinating leads in Thompson, Dorothy, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), 221, 232Google Scholar.

6 McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), 234Google Scholar.

7 Frost, Thomas, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities (1876; London, 1881), 171–72Google Scholar.

8 Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (London, 1990), 155Google Scholar.

9 Holyoake, G. J., The Last Trial for Atheism in England (1851; London, 1871), xGoogle Scholar.

10 Savage, Mike and Miles, Andrew, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London, 1994), 34Google Scholar. See also Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, “Social Mobility and Personal Identity,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 5, no. 2 (1964): 331–43Google Scholar; Savage, Mike, “Social Mobility and Class Analysis: A New Agenda for Social History?Social History 19, no. 1 (January 1994): 6979CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miles, Andrew and Vincent, David, eds., Building European Society: Occupational Change and Social Mobility in Europe, 1840–1940 (Manchester, 1994)Google Scholar; Miles, Andrew, Social Mobility in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

11 There is a useful discussion of the notion of liminality in Steedman, Carolyn, The Radical Soldier's Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908 (London, 1988), 5658Google Scholar.

12 The debate on this issue has produced a voluminous literature but see, inter alia, Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Rethinking Chartism,” in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Foster, John, “The Declassing of Language,” New Left Review 150 (March/April 1985): 2945Google Scholar; Cronin, James, “Language, Politics and the Critique of Social History,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 177–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palmer, Brian D., Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990)Google Scholar; Speigel, Gabrielle M., “History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (January 1990): 5986CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayfield, David and Thorne, Susan, “Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language,” Social History 17, no. 2 (May 1992): 165–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawrence, Jon and Taylor, Miles, “The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language—a Reply,” Social History 18, no. 1 (January 1993): 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sewell, William H., “Toward a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Berlanstein, Lenard (Urbana, IL, 1993)Google Scholar; Kirk, Neville, “History, Language Ideas and Post-modernism: A Materialist View,” Social History 19, no. 2 (May 1994): 221–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joyce, Patrick, “The End of Social History?Social History 20, no. 1 (January 1995): 7391CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eley, Geoff, “Is All the World a Text?” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. McDonald, Terence (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996)Google Scholar; Steinberg, Marc W., “Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons between Post-structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective,” Social History 21, no. 2 (May 1996): 193214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Epstein, James, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA, 2003), 1556Google Scholar.

13 Frost, Thomas, Forty Years Recollections, Literary and Political (London, 1880), 15Google Scholar.

14 For interconnections between Owenism and Chartism see Claeys, Gregory, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For this milieu see McCalman, Radical Underworld; Sigel, Lisa, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 1549Google Scholar. Frost asserted that only upper-class patrons bought expensive pornographic texts in Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (London, 1886), 5354Google Scholar, though Lynda Nead argues for a wider influence in Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT, 2000), 180–84Google Scholar.

16 Technological changes were almost totally confined to London before mid-century as Musson, A. E. notes in The Typographical Association: Origins and History Up to 1949 (Oxford, 1954), 16Google Scholar. For firsthand accounts of deteriorating social relations in the printing trade see Smith, Charles Manby, The Working Man's Way in the World: Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer (1857; London, 1967), 1622Google Scholar; Adams, W. E., Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903; New York, 1968), 339, 377Google Scholar. The classic study of the tramping system remains Hobsbawm, E. J., “The Tramping Artisan,” in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), 3463Google Scholar.

17 Frost rejected Barmby's mix of pantheism and Christian theology and tried, briefly, to run an alternative title called the Communist Journal. Barmby reacted vindictively and wrote to Holyoake warning him to have nothing to do with such an untrustworthy character. Barmby to Holyoake, n.d., letter 338, Holyoake Collection, Co-operative Union Library, Manchester.

18 Frost, Recollections, 88–89. Among his grandmother's books (which Frost later inherited) were bound copies of the Spectator, Guardian, Adventurer, and Persian Letters, as well as an edition of the letters of the second Lord Lyttelton.

19 Frost, Thomas, Emma Mayfield: or, the Rector's Daughter (London, 1848), 147Google Scholar.

20 Frost, Reminiscences, 75.

21 Note that G. J. Holyoake also represented the workshop as a kind of prison in his autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life (1892; London 1906), 1:20.

22 Rancière, Jacques, “The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History,” International Labor and Working Class History 24 (Fall 1983): 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Webb, R. K., The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848 (London, 1955)Google Scholar; Altick, R. D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957)Google Scholar; James, Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–50 (London, 1963)Google Scholar, and, ed., Print and the People, 1819–1851 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Haywood, Ian, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

24 The phrase is from New Grub Street (1891; London, 1985), 46Google Scholar.

25 Frost, Thomas, Croydon and the North Down: A Handy Guide to Rambles in the District (London, 1881), 54Google Scholar.

26 Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, 397–98; Ashton, Owen, W. E. Adams: Chartist, Radical and Journalist, 1832–1906 (Tyne and Wear, 1991)Google Scholar. There is a damning portrait of the hack writer in Smith, The Working Man's Way in the World, 209–16.

27 Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews with Michael Foucault (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 113–38Google Scholar. See also Rose, Mark, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 5185CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books (London, 1994), 2932Google Scholar.

28 Williams, Raymond, Orwell (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Rai, Alok, Orwell and the Politics of Despair (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar. In Politics and Letters (London, 1979), 388Google Scholar, Williams stressed that a proper study of Orwell should include “not Orwell writing, but what wrote Orwell.”

29 Frost, Recollections, 87–88. Note that Jasper Milvain in Gissing's New Grub Street (62) also recognized the importance of tact. Bowlby, Rachel's Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, 1985)Google Scholar discusses Gissing within the context of the commodification of literature.

30 Frost did, however, occasionally credit a number of outstanding contemporaries with genius, notably Charles Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. See Recollections, 320.

31 Ibid., 90.

32 Ibid., 188.

33 Ibid., 243–44.

34 Ibid., 247.

35 Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, 393.

36 On the subaltern writer as exile see Said, Edward, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London, 1994), 39Google Scholar.

37 Frost, Reminiscences, 79. For the wider context see Lee, A. J., The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, 125–26: “Teaching and journalism, the principle escape routes for an educated working man, guaranteed neither prosperity nor status.”

38 Frost, Reminiscences, 330.

39 Cross, The Common Writer, 63.

40 Royal Literary Fund Archive, file no. 2260, reel 90. Frost received grants of between £30 and £50 on each application, £420 in total.

41 Frost, Reminiscences, v.

42 Ibid., 205–6.

43 Ibid., 106.

44 On the history of journalism see Jones, Aled, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996)Google Scholar; Chalaby, Jean, The Invention of Journalism (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hampton, Mark, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana, IL, 2004)Google Scholar.

45 The employers’ side was later defended by one of Frost's own publishers, Tinsley, William, in Random Recollections of an Old Publisher (London, 1900), 1:309–12Google Scholar.

46 Frost, Recollections, 33.

47 The serial ran in the Barnsley Times between 15 April and 29 July 1882. Frost leaned heavily on John Hugh Burland's unpublished Annals of Barnsley, parts of which had appeared over the preceding decade in the local Liberal paper, the Barnsley Chronicle. He also corresponded with (and probably met) the aging Burland, who like Vallance had been a leader of local Chartism in its early phase.

48 This work was first published as a penny serial by Purkess. Frost's name appeared on the title page of the bound edition (probably the first time he had seen his name in print), and he thanked readers for their “most flattering” reception of the novel in the preface.

49 Frost, Reminiscences, 19–20.

50 Frost, Thomas, The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776–1876 (London, 1876), esp. 1:xiiiGoogle Scholar.

51 Rose, Jonathan discusses this phenomenon in “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 1 (March 1992): 6364CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2001)Google Scholar.

52 Frost, Thomas, The Life of Thomas Lord Lyttelton (London, 1876), vii, 76, 88–91Google Scholar. Lyttelton read many deistical works of the Enlightenment, and, according to Frost, it was his skeptical intelligence that proved attractive initially. See Frost, Reminiscences, 226–33.

53 Frost, Thomas, ed., Complete Narrative of the Mutiny in India, from its Commencement to the Present Time (London, 1858), 23Google Scholar.

54 Notably Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

55 Frost, Thomas, The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs (1876; London, 1881), 130, 148, 320Google Scholar. Frost also emphasized popular resistance to political censorship at fairs. For a modern treatment of these themes see Yeo, Eileen and Yeo, Stephen, eds., Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981)Google Scholar.

56 Frost, Circus Life, 126, 185–86. On cross-dressing see also Cocks, Harry, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

57 Frost, Thomas, The Lives of the Conjurors (London, 1881), 332Google Scholar. On the struggle against superstition see Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, esp. 156–59.

58 Frost, Recollections, 340.

59 Harrison, Brian and Hollis, Patricia, “Chartism, Liberalism and the Life of Robert Lowery,” English Historical Review 82, no. 324 (July 1967): 503–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biagini, Eugenio and Reid, Alasdair, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biagini, Eugenio, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar. Vincent, John underlined the multiform and contradictory nature of liberalism in The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–68 (London, 1966)Google Scholar.

60 See Gray, Robert's critique of this trend in “Class, Politics and Historical ‘Revisionism,’Social History 19, no. 2 (May 1994): 209–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 Frost, Recollections, 132.

63 Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power (London, 1991), 4041Google Scholar.

64 Frost, Reminiscences, 135–36.

65 Frost restated his commitment to “the Charter and something more” in Recollections, 38, 341. The ideological continuities found in the work of a better-known working-class writer are stressed in Hewitt, Martin, “Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: The Case of Samuel Bamford,” Historical Journal 34, no. 4 (December 1991): 873–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Shrewsbury Chronicle, 16 August 1867, 4, 8 November 1867, 4.

67 Shrewsbury Chronicle, 22 March 1867, 4, 7 June 1867, 4.

68 Shrewsbury Chronicle, 12 January 1872, 6, 2 February 1872, 6, 15 March 1872, 5, 22 March 1872, 6.

69 Frost, Recollections, 333–34.

70 Barnsley Times, 18 February 1882, 5.

71 Barnsley Times, 6 May 1882, 5, 10 June 1882, 5, 24 June 1882, 5.

72 Barnsley Times, 3 June 1882, 5.

73 On discursive constraints note also Epstein, Radical Expression, vii.

74 Frost did not prioritize the group over the individual self, which Gagnier, Regenia has argued was a distinctive feature of many nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies in Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford, 1991), 138–70Google Scholar.

75 One might also compare him to displaced “middle-class” writers and politicians like Henry Mayhew and Ernest Jones. Interestingly, Frost was employed to finish Jones's novel, The Lass and the Lady (1855), when the latter ran out of steam. Taylor, Miles's study, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, considers the literariness of Jones's political self.

76 Holyoake used his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1842 as a springboard for his career as a radical speaker and writer. See Grugel, Lee, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia, 1976), 2628Google Scholar.

77 Holyoake to Mill, 26 December 1862, letter 1457, Mill to Holyoake, 29 December 1862, letter 1458, Holyoake Collection; Kent, Christopher, “The Whittington Club: A Bohemian Experiment in Middle-Class Social Reform,” Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (September 1974): 3155Google Scholar.

78 Including John Bright, William Gladstone, and Herbert Spencer. See letters 2291, 2305, 2317, 2329, 2334, 2340, 2397, and 3092 in the Holyoake Collection.

79 Gurney, Peter, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996), 119Google Scholar.

80 Cited by Smith, F. B., Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97 (Manchester, 1973), 98Google Scholar.

81 Cooper to Holyoake, 10 November 1853, letter 606, Holyoake Collection. Cooper also accused Holyoake of being “fairly admitted into the respectable circle” by this time.

82 Joyce, Patrick, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 2382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Vicinus, Martha, The Ambiguities of Self-Help: The Lancashire Dialect Writer Edwin Waugh (Littleborough, 1984)Google Scholar; Beetham, “Healthy Reading: The Periodical Press in Late Victorian Manchester,” in Kidd and Roberts, eds., City, Class and Culture, 180–87.

84 Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 105–7. Brierley joined the Masons in 1865 (the initiation fee was £4 10s.) and remained an active lodge member all his life.

85 See the short story, “The Battle of Langley Heights,” in The Chronicles of Waverlow (Manchester, 1863), 3550Google Scholar. In Home Memories and Recollections of a Life (Manchester, 1886), 24Google Scholar, Brierley observed that when the “great strike” broke out, “we found the English Statute Book confronted by mob law.”

86 Joyce, Visions of the People, 284–87, 297–99, and “The People's English: Language and Class in England, c. 1840–1920,” in Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy (Cambridge, 1991), 154–90Google Scholar.

87 Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 112.

88 Ibid., 114.

89 See Gurney, Peter, “George Jacob Holyoake: Socialism, Association, and Co-operation in Nineteenth-Century England,” in New Views of Co-operation, ed. Yeo, Stephen (London, 1988), 6465Google Scholar.

90 Frost, Reminiscences, vi.

91 Linebaugh, Peter uses the term in a very different context in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991; London, 1993), 119–22, 151–52Google Scholar.

92 Clark, Anna, “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (January 1992): 6288CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joyce, Visions of the People, 310–12, and Democratic Subjects, 176–90. A useful survey of the burgeoning literature on Victorian melodrama, which incorporated some of the tropes found in the earlier form, can be found in McWilliam, Rohan, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (Fall 2000): 5784CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a good example of Frost's use of the picaresque, see Alice Leighton; or, the Murder at the Druids’ Stones (1857). Frost knew the work of Tobias Smollett, the most well-known picaresque novelist, intimately. See Frost, Recollections, 319–20.

93 Harrison, J. F. C., The Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present (London, 1984), 18Google Scholar.

94 Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier's Tale, 104–6.

95 Frost, Reminiscences, 164–65.

96 Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 7–41; Ellis, S. M., “Jack Sheppard in Literature and Drama,” in Jack Sheppard, ed. Bleackley, Horace (Edinburgh, 1933)Google Scholar. W. H. Ainsworth's version of the story, which was serialized from January 1839, sparked off the craze that led some middle-class observers to opine that “all the Chartists in the land are less dangerous than this nightmare of a book.” The experience of incarceration was real enough for many Londoners in the 1820s and 1830s, decades that witnessed an explosion in the prison population. See Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1978; London, 1989), 185–86Google Scholar; Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), 574–75Google Scholar.

97 Frost, Reminiscences, 20, Emma Mayfield, 56, Paul the Poacher, 64–65 (a direct crib of one of Sheppard's most famous escapes), Obi; or, Three Fingered Jack (1851), 9–10, and Alice Leighton, 36–39.

98 All three sometimes wrote different things for different audiences or markets. Alternative readings of Holyoake, for example, can be found in Tholfsen, Trygve, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976), 264Google Scholar; Joyce, Visions of the People, 52; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 141, 380; Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 114–25. Brierley's continuing radicalism is stressed by Taylor, Anthony, “Reynolds Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy and the Radical Anti-Jubilee: Britain's Anti-Monarchist Tradition Reconsidered,” Historical Research 68, 167 (October 1995): 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 103.

99 Frost, Circus Life, 173.