Journal article
Under Physical Siege: Early Victorian Autobiographies of Working-Class Women
Philological quarterly, Vol.92(2), pp.251-269
03/22/2013
Abstract
After poetry, autobiography was the principal mode of nineteenth-century working-class literary expression, and there is a deeper sense in which it may have been crucial to the preservation of a working-class sense of identity. As David Vincent has observed in his pioneering work Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, "The working class had few history books other than these autobiographies, no historians other than those who remembered and the few who wrote". But Vincent also commented on a "major silence": there were many more autobiographies of Victorian working-class men, and it is not difficult to guess why. The author will argue in this article that more systematic barriers underlay this "absence of self-confidence". Vincent concluded his study of workingmen's autobiographies with a moving analysis of the value they held for those who wrote them: The final, and perhaps most convincing reason why the autobiographers believed that some progress had been made by the labouring poor during their lifetime was the simple fact that they had been able to write an autobiography.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Under Physical Siege: Early Victorian Autobiographies of Working-Class Women
- Creators
- Florence Boos
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Philological quarterly, Vol.92(2), pp.251-269
- Publisher
- University of Iowa, Philological Quarterly
- ISSN
- 0031-7977
- eISSN
- 2169-5342
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/22/2013
- Academic Unit
- International Programs; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398056502771
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