About the Working-Class Women Poets (WCWP) Archive
In recent years, the expansion of the canon has uncovered a wealth of Victorian writers whose work until now has lain dormant in the recesses of libraries and archives. While working-class male writers have enjoyed a certain rebirth with the work of Michael Sanders, Ian Haywood, and others (1), the writing of working-class women has still been critically neglected.
Current Victorian poetry anthologies illuminate the tendency of critics to focus on the work of middle-class and upper-class women writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and the Brontë sisters, while ignoring working-class women poets almost entirely. Considering the tremendous scholarly attention being given to expanding the canon and nineteenth-century working-class literature, it is surprising that, of the existing anthologies of specifically Chartist Verse, compiled by Y.V. Kovalev, Peter Scheckner, and Brian Maidment, only Maidment provides (and very briefly) selections by women poets. Recently, Florence Boos' and Susan Zlotnik's studies on working-class women poets have begun to examine gendered class relations, asking how women might fit into the larger rubric of working-class politics and literature. Great steps have been made towards the recovery of working-class women poets by John Goodridge and his team of editors for the three volume Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets 1800-1900, and Florence Boos' Broadview Anthology of Working-Class Women Poets (2), and her current work in progress, The Mediated Muse: Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Scotland, when published, will be the first book-length examination of working-class women's poetry in the Victorian period.
WCWP Archive: A Vision
This electronic archive serves as an extension of my current research on the working-class women poets of the Victorian era. My doctoral dissertation, entitled, "Of Factory Girls and Serving Maids: Literary Labours of Working-Class Women in Victorian Britain," discusses women's important role in the formation of working-class political discourse through poetry in Victorian Britain, from the beginning of the Chartist movement to the end of the nineteenth century. While seeking to create a space for working-class women within the Victorian poetic canon, I hope to contribute to broader historical and cultural research on the working classes in Britain, as well as the history of English poetry. The archive is currently in its preliminary stages, as evidenced by the small number of poems and poets currently contained within the database. This is in no way indicative of the number of working-class women poets who were writing in the Victorian era. The archive will be updated frequently, and will continue to grow as more material is added (and discovered!). The next stage is to develop a full XML beta of the site, which will be compatible with the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) Collex. A Brief Note on Editorial Practices
All poems are in their original form, transcribed from extant versions of the text. If variations occur in subsequent editions (rare), I have noted them in the footnotes. I have also maintained a faithful transcription of obvious typographical errors within the poems themselves. Author footnotes are indictated by the author's initials. Indentation within the poems has been regularized to either a single indent (40 pixels) or a double indent (80 pixels) based on the original copy-text. If you would like to cite the WCWP Archive, information on documenting from online sources can be found in The MLA Handbook, the MLA Online FAQ, or The Chicago Manual of Style. Please send questions and comments to: wcwp@dal.ca
This electronic archive serves as an extension of my current research on the working-class women poets of the Victorian era. My doctoral dissertation, entitled, "Of Factory Girls and Serving Maids: Literary Labours of Working-Class Women in Victorian Britain," discusses women's important role in the formation of working-class political discourse through poetry in Victorian Britain, from the beginning of the Chartist movement to the end of the nineteenth century. While seeking to create a space for working-class women within the Victorian poetic canon, I hope to contribute to broader historical and cultural research on the working classes in Britain, as well as the history of English poetry. The archive is currently in its preliminary stages, as evidenced by the small number of poems and poets currently contained within the database. This is in no way indicative of the number of working-class women poets who were writing in the Victorian era. The archive will be updated frequently, and will continue to grow as more material is added (and discovered!). The next stage is to develop a full XML beta of the site, which will be compatible with the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) Collex. A Brief Note on Editorial Practices
All poems are in their original form, transcribed from extant versions of the text. If variations occur in subsequent editions (rare), I have noted them in the footnotes. I have also maintained a faithful transcription of obvious typographical errors within the poems themselves. Author footnotes are indictated by the author's initials. Indentation within the poems has been regularized to either a single indent (40 pixels) or a double indent (80 pixels) based on the original copy-text. If you would like to cite the WCWP Archive, information on documenting from online sources can be found in The MLA Handbook, the MLA Online FAQ, or The Chicago Manual of Style. Please send questions and comments to: wcwp@dal.ca
