Abstract
This chapter examines the role of collective biography, a genre comprising brief didactic and inspirational sketches, in the narrative construction of working-class authorship during the mid-nineteenth century. In the three decades separating G. L. Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (1830) from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), collective biographies of writers (chiefly poets) affiliated to the ‘labouring class’ flourished. Focusing especially on the work of Edwin Paxton Hood (1820–85), whose books include The Literature of Labour and Genius and Industry, the chapter assesses the ways in which these biographical compendia challenge prevailing assumptions about the division between manual and mental work, yielding new insights into the labour of literature.
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Notes
- 1.
For a fuller discussion of this debate, see Salmon (103–10).
- 2.
This capaciousness did not extend to significant inclusion of women, a fact acknowledged by the subsequent publication of a complementary volume, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties. Illustrated by female examples, in 1847.
- 3.
For a contemporary biographical account of Hood’s life, see Giddins.
- 4.
Unless otherwise indicated in parentheses, page references for this work refer to the 1851 First Edition.
- 5.
Hood may have had in mind the etymological origins of the word ‘poetry’ from the Greek poiein, meaning ‘to make’.
- 6.
Later in his career Hood acknowledged his debt to Carlyle in a full-length biography: Thomas Carlyle: Philosophic Thinker, Theologian, Historian, and Poet (1875).
- 7.
For further discussion of the origins of Self-Help in Smiles’s work as a journalist and lecturer during the 1840s, see Tyrrell. On the wider culture of working-class self-education during the nineteenth century, see Rose (62–82).
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Salmon, R. (2018). The Literature of Labour: Collective Biography and Working-Class Authorship, 1830–1859. In: Waithe, M., White, C. (eds) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_3
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