According to Wikipedia, the first use of the word ‘autobiography’ was in 1797, but David Vincent, drawing on Cassandra Falke’s Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820-1848 (2013), gives the first use as ‘by a writer from a humble background’, Ann Yearsley ‘the “Bristol Milkwoman and Poetess”’ who ‘attached an “Autobiographical Memoir” to the fourth edition of poems published in 1786’ (Vincent 2016: 165). Given that, as Vincent records, working-class autobiography was an established genre by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the question arises as to what extent autobiography is a working-class genre that became widely adopted throughout society? Or, whether it is a middle- or upper-class genre that the working class adapted for their own purposes? What is important here, rather than establishing precedence, is a question about the politics of working-class autobiographies: do these texts represent the assimilation of the ‘respectable’ working class to middle-class values or the vanguard of an independent working-class consciousness?
I will be looking at more recent research on working-class autobiography, such as Falke’s book, during the course of this project but I wanted to start with work connected with the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies and the three-volume critical annotated bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989), compiled by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall. I find it interesting, for example, that in the preface to his 1974 anthology of working-class autobiographies, Useful Toil, Burnett mentions John Goldthorpe’s Affluent Worker studies to make the connection that for both contemporary car workers and nineteenth-century workers, job satisfaction was not a priority and work was a means to an end. Viewed purely historically, we might therefore interpret the attitudes of 1960s car workers as a product of a British working-class consciousness formed in the Victorian period (which would be in keeping with some of the dominant strands of British historiography during the 1960s and 1970s) but, from today’s perspective (when all of these assumptions seem less certain), we might wonder how much Goldthorpe’s influential studies were shaping the way that newly-rediscovered nineteenth-century material was received.
In Destiny Obscure, the 1982 sequel to Useful Toil, Burnett tells us that ‘the happiest memories of child life generally came from large working-class families, which by modern standards, had no luxuries and few comforts, but which stood somewhat above the level of the very poor’ (16). This was, he makes clear, the ‘respectable’ working class who respected education, hard work and self-improvement ‘but not usually at the expense of a close, affectionate family life’. On the one hand, this all sounds a bit too close to George Orwell’s vision of the working-class interior in The Road to Wigan Pier, in which dad reads the racing results while mum knits and the kids play with the dog. On the other hand, this equation of Victorian working-class autobiography with respectability quite possibly does reflect the common conception of the genre in the twentieth century (at least, up to the 1970s) and indicates one of the reasons why the politically-motivated (socialist or communist) working-class writers of the 1930s turned to fictionalising their experiences in order to avoid respectability and its implied acquiescence to bourgeois values (this is a topic I will be returning to in subsequent posts).
More generally, Burnett seems from the prefaces to these two volumes (this is, therefore, a provisional assessment) to be presenting what I would think of as a small c conservative view of working-class autobiography. In Useful Toil, he tells us that ‘their intellectual and cultural horizons are strictly limited’ (18) but suggests that the working classes maintained ‘an inner, secret life which perpetuated traditional values and patterns of behaviour, essentially of rural origin into the new urban industrial society’ (18). It was this ‘secret life’ which allowed the working classes to resist the Victorian cult of work as the centre of human existence. I rather like this latter thought (as I sit typing into my laptop on a Saturday) which recalls both Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ and suggests something of the way that Lewis Grassic Gibbon injects rural values into the industrial proletariat in Grey Granite (1934), the final volume of A Scots Quair. I’m less enamoured of Burnett’s argument that ‘the chief defect of the use of diaries and autobiographies as a source must be the self-selectivity of the “sample”’ (Useful Toil, 11). Yes, to the extent that one person’s experience of the weaving industry is not sufficient evidence to make generalised claims about that industry; but no, when, as so often happens, the catch-all accusation of non-representativeness is used to dismiss the utility of an entire category of research (for example, the pointlessness of much of the discussion of representativeness that dogs Mass Observation research makes it tedious beyond belief). Burnett goes on to argue that the activity of keeping a diary or writing an autobiography automatically sets that person apart from their fellows, that there is more writing from skilled workers, and that this writing is not necessarily trustful because the material is selected and sometimes ‘improved’ to show the individual in a better light for future family readers. Refreshingly, these potential flaws are addressed directly in David Vincent’s Bread, Freedom & Knowledge (1981), a revised and extended version of his 1975 PhD thesis, ‘The Growth of Working-Class Consciousness in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: A study of the autobiographies of working men’.
Discussing the reliability of autobiography in the introduction to his book, Vincent states:
In the end, however, the truth of an autobiography is not dependent on a certain relationship, however it is controlled, between the autobiographer’s statements and the reality of the outside world, but rather on the quality of the relationship which he establishes between the various aspects of his personality as he seeks to reconstruct its development. It is not a matter of honesty or deceit, but rather of a capacity to grasp imaginatively the complexity of the life-long interaction between the self and the outside world. (6)
It’s this capacity for autobiography (in its various forms) to lay bare the relationship between self and the world (which in practice is the world as constructed by the social structures surrounding the self) that is central to my project, ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’. Vincent goes on to quote Wilhelm Dilthey to the effect that autobiography is only the literary expression of a process of reflection that is frequently made by everyone, before concluding: ‘The mere fact, therefore, that the action of recollection was translated into a written form and then, in the majority of cases [of the working-class autobiographies Vincent analyses], published, does not in itself isolate the contents of an autobiography from the experiences of those who have remained silent’ (7). Far from being unrepresentative, nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies give us an insight into all the unrecorded memories of the masses who lived through the same rapidly-changing social conditions. In terms of adapting to radical social change, Vincent is surely right when he points out that ‘an autobiography, however doubtful its conclusions, represents a victory over the uncertainties of life’ (68). However, as he also insists, the autobiographies should be treated as literary works rather than ‘primary’ sources to be mined for historical snippets; not least because treating them as literary works draws attention to the relationship between autobiographical self-analysis – that process of reflection open to all – and the formation of class consciousness. This key question also touches on ‘the precise relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of bread and freedom’ (132).
Vincent’s account of the various ways his autobiographers acquired books and intelligent conversation of their contents is particularly compelling. What he reveals, is that the autobiographers came from all parts of the working class and not just the skilled artisans who would go on to form the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nor did they follow the prescriptions of those middle-class societies set up to spread ‘useful knowledge’ and they certainly didn’t apply this knowledge to the work they did for others (although many did use their learning to eke out an income from book dealing, teaching or writing). Rather than orienting themselves to middle-class patterns of behaviour, the autobiographers responded to the break-up of pre-industrial popular culture ‘by the rapid development of every form of communication’ even as they tried to harness those forces of change: ‘It was in this sense that they may be seen as representative of their class as a whole. As they explored the consequences of the decline of the oral condition and pushed forward the process of secularisation, they were engaging with developments which eventually would permeate every aspect of their culture’ (195). Vincent’s autobiographers were not just a working-class intelligentsia (predating Marx) but the vanguard of a working-class consciousness that embraced the rapid change of the industrial revolution for all its horrors because it realised it was the means of alleviating precarity and establishing the new material conditions which would support an independent working class.
My favourite line in Vincent’s book is when, discussing how his autobiographers’ reading patterns were completely at odds with the paternalistic attempts of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to restrict and channel them in the interests of moral improvement and reason, he notes, ‘Once they had discovered its existence, they approached the higher class of literature with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a child let loose in a sweet shop’ (156). This reminds me of myself in my late teens and early twenties before I eventually started my degree in Philosophy and Literature. My parents had left school at 15 and 16 but were both readers. My dad’s favourite books were The Riddle of the Sands and The Swiss Family Robinson, while the favourite authors of my mum (who several times came top of the year for English at her secondary modern school) were Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. As a teen I read John Wyndham, J.R.R. Tolkien, Alistair MacLean, Gerald Durrell, James Herriot and George MacDonald Fraser until, seduced by Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the Granada television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1981), I branched into Evelyn Waugh. Thereafter, I plundered libraries and second-hand bookshops with ‘indiscriminate enthusiasm’ to read Lawrence, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Böll and Grass, but also Mailer, Kesey, Thompson, Irving (and not many women apart from Lisa Alther). Of course, there is no parallel in conditions with Vincent’s autobiographers as I was generally happily ensconced in a centrally-heated bedroom rather than struggling to find time, space and a candle. However, where the connection does lie is in the shared sense of intoxicating freedom that reading opens up beyond otherwise restrictive mental outlooks, whether they are those of the early-nineteenth-century working class or post-war lower-middle-class suburbia. As with the autobiographers, I have also experienced friction from fellow workers for reading in the workplace – something that has disastrous consequences for Arthur Gardner in Walter Brierley’s autobiografictional novel, Sandwichman (1937). In my next post, I will consider proletarian autobiografiction of the 1930s in relation to the longer-established tradition of working-class autobiography discussed above.
Further Reading:
Burnett, John. Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 [1982].
Burnett, John. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977 [1974].
Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge & Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography, London and New York: Methuen, 1982 [1981].
Vincent, David. ‘Working-Class Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century’, in Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 165-178.
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