Victorian Industrial Workers and Print Culture

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座摘要/ Abstract 

This talk explores late Victorian factory workers’ newspapers, such as the Cotton Factory Times, Yorkshire Factory Times and Northern Weekly. It investigates how they enabled textile factory workers to participate in literary culture, both as readers and as writers. As distinct from the local press, these newspapers (which were strongly linked to trades unionism) encouraged explicitly political writing, especially in their serial fiction and poetry columns. This means that the literature produced by factory workers for these papers differs markedly from the usual topics found in Victorian popular literature, and contains far more direct accounts of life on the factory floor and workplace issues than can be located elsewhere. Newspapers also connected like-minded workers to each other, creating networks of aspiring writers and journalists whose careers were developed via journalism and literature – more than one contributor or editor, for instance, moved into a political career in the Labour party. Others, like Charles Allen Clarke (‘Teddy Ashton’) became local literary celebrities. I will argue that the rise of workers’ newspapers, run by those who had experience in factory work themselves, helped to create forms of activist literature, and encouraged workers to participate in print culture in new ways. 

 主讲人简介/ CV 

Professor Kirstie Blair moved to Strathclyde in August 2016, after working for the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow. Her primary area of research is Victorian literature, particularly poetry and poetics, working-class writing, Scottish literature, and literature and medicine. She also researches and teaches in the field of children’s literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. Professor Blair has published two monographs on Victorian poetry, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012) and Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (2019), both with Oxford University Press, in addition to editing or co-editing two essay collections, and authoring a variety of articles and book chapters. She is currently completing a monograph on working-class verse culture in Victorian Scotland, and has edited an anthology of Scottish Victorian newspaper verse, The Poets of the People’s Journal (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2016).

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