The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

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Working Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. ZolbergWorking Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986. viii, 471 pp. $47.00 U.S.

Canadian Journal of History ◽

10.3138/cjh.23.1.125 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 125-126

Author(s):

Mary Lynn Stewart

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

Western Europe ◽

The United States ◽

Class Formation ◽

Princeton University

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The History of ‘the Reading Public’

10.1093/oso/9780198800170.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Collini

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Change ◽

Working Class ◽

Literary History ◽

Reading Public ◽

Reading Matter ◽

History Of ◽

Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

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