Florence Boos examines the proliferation of working-class writing in a variety of genres – poetry, fiction, autobiography, and journalism – at a time when there was a significant middle-class interest in forms of working-class culture. This led to the financing and production of publications such as Howitt’s and People’s Journal, Eliza Cook’s Journal, The Literature of Working Men, and the Dundee-based People’s Journal. The broadly class-based nature of the pervasive violence of the period is acknowledged here as a given in works which experiment with form in order to represent the authenticity of the working-class experience. As Boos concludes, ‘an integration of these writings into our conceptions of Victorian authorship can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the latter, as well as greater appreciation of the unique contributions of mid-century British working-class writers to the literary representation of the social issues of their time’.

A Welshman striving to make it in the English world, Jones’ path toward leadership in the international psychoanalytical movement was long and strenuous. Although not as innovative compared to others included in this volume, he made unique contributions in bringing psychoanalysis to the English-speaking world. On the brink of WWII, he risked his life to go to Vienna, already occupied by the Nazis, where he managed to convince the dying Freud to leave Austria for London. Personally responsible for bringing both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud to England, he was caught in the middle of vicious fights between these two powerful women and their followers, and barely survived a near-fatal heart attack. From age seventy to his death at seventy-nine, Jones labored at completing the 1500-page, three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, which remains the only officially authorized biography of Freud.