The Importance of Being Earnest: Manly Artisans and Sincere Sages

Abstract

Taylor blamed the commercial failure of The Shepherd’s Calendar on the fact that poetry was increasingly becoming a luxury item, and declared that readers now preferred works of utility.¹ Reverting to his more serious side, he went off to supply such works to the University of London. The Regency period was rapidly giving way to the early Victorian one. Thomas Carlyle’s first publication was in the London Magazine, but he quickly distanced himself from this frivolous world. His social criticism came to define and then dominate Condition-of-England debates in the 1830s and 1840s. He exhorted the artisan-writers such as Thomas Cooper, Ebenezer Elliott and Samuel Bamford who were replacing peasant-poets like Clare to concentrate on factual prose that made realistic, topical and thus useful contributions to these debates.