Viewing all of these stories together, Falke captures the richness of working-class culture, the bravery of these authors' persistence, and the fecundity of their literary imaginations. Literature by the Working Class proposes a way to read working-class autobiographies that attends to both the socio-historical influences on their composition and their value as individual literary works. Although social historians, reading historians, and historians of rhetoric have recognized the significance of working-class autobiography to the early nineteenth century, providing broad overviews of the genre, very little work has been done to read these works as literature. Part of this negligence arises for the style of these autobiographies. They reject notions of autonomous selfhood and linear self-creation that characterize other Romantic period autobiographical works.
Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd; Ellen Johnston’s “Autobiography”; and James Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy. This Broadview edition also includes a remarkably rich selection of historical documents that provide context for these works. Appendices include contemporary responses to the autobiographies, debates on factory legislation, transcripts of testimony given before parliamentary committees on child labour, and excerpts from literary works on factory life by Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.
A household name, an Australian rock icon, the elder statesman of Ozrock - there isn't an accolade or cliche that doesn't apply to Jimmy Barnes. But long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life. Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock'n'roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes. It is a memoir burning with the frustration and frenetic energy of teenage sex, drugs, violence and ambition for more than what you have. Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny - Jimmy Barnes's childhood memoir is at once the story of migrant dreams fulfilled and dashed. Arriving in Australia in the Summer of 1962, things went from bad to worse for the Swan family - Dot, Jim and their six kids. The scramble to manage in the tough northern suburbs of Adelaide in the 60s would take its toll on the Swans as dwindling money, too much alcohol, and fraying tempers gave way to violence and despair. This is the story a family's collapse, but also a young boy's dream to escape the misery of the suburbs with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a rock'n'roll band and get out of town for good.
"I slipped into the world while my mother was on her knees scrubbing the floor." So begins inauspiciously on July 18, 1879, the life--and the unfinished autobiography--of Rose Pastor Stokes. An East European Jewish immigrant, Stokes became a member of the American Socialist party, a founding member of the American Communist party, and such an outspoken critic of U.S. policies that she was convicted of seditious activities during World War I. Indeed, Stokes was one of the most deeply committed American radicals in the first decades of this century. In a lengthy introduction the editors provide a detailed outline of Stokes's life. As a young girl living in the slums of Cleveland, she helped support her family with earnings from her job at a cigar factory. There, Stokes came in contact for the first time with socialism and the hope of a better and more equitable world. Eventually leaving the cigar factory for a job in New York at the Jewish Daily News, she met and married James Graham Phelps Stokes, an outspoken Socialist and a member of a wealthy, aristocratic New York family. Never comfortable with wealth and position, however, Rose remained loyal to her class and dedicated to workers' causes. Although the marriage lasted nearly twenty years, she became increasingly radical as her husband gradually returned to the safety of conventional politics. Stokes helped organize labor strikes in New York, distributed birth control information to the poor, spoke widely on behalf of the Socialist party, and worked in general to expunge what she perceived as the evils of capitalism. Late in her life, when fighting cancer, she attempted to write an autobiography that she hoped would give final meaning to her life's work for "a world in which there will be no unemployment, hunger, insecurity, or war." The manuscript was never completed, however, and has never before been published. The work conveys Stokes's intense, passionate personality, commitment to principles, and fierce dedication to the working class. Viewing a vital era of American social history through Stokes's individual experience, the reader is offered a vivid firsthand perspective of the movements for social change that galvanized the American labor force in the early twentieth century.
This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.
John Lennon called himself a working class hero. George Harrison was a working class mystic. Born in Liverpool as the son of a bus conductor and a shop assistant, for the first six years of his life he lived in a house with no indoor bathroom. This book gives an honest, in-depth view of his personal journey from his blue-collar childhood to his role as a world-famous spiritual icon. Author Gary Tillery’s approach is warmly human, free of the fawning but insolent tone of most rock biographers. He frankly discusses the role of drugs in leading Harrison to mystical insight but emphasizes that he soon renounced psychedelics as a means to the spiritual path. It was with conscious commitment that Harrison journeyed to India, studied sitar with Ravi Shankar, practiced yoga, learned meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and became a devotee of Hinduism. George worked hard to subdue his own ego and to understand the truth beyond appearances. He preferred to keep a low profile, but his empathy for suffering people led him to spearhead the first rock-and-roll super event for charity. And despite his wealth and fame, he was always delighted to slip on overalls and join in manual labor on his grounds. At ease with holy men discussing the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, he was ever the bloke from Liverpool whose father drove a bus, whose brothers were tradesmen, and who had worked himself as an apprentice electrician until the day destiny called. Tillery’s engaging narrative depicts Harrison as a sincere seeker who acted out of genuine care for humanity and used his celebrity to be of service in the world. Fans of all generations will treasure this book for the inspiring portrayal it gives of their beloved “quiet” Beatle.
Written entirely in East coast Scots A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo as well as his long time suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.
First published in 1981, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom is a study of 142 working class autobiographies all of which cover some part of the period between 1790 and 1850. It is a full-scale examination of a form of source material that is significantly extensive. The book illustrates many aspects of ordinary working-class family life as well as the working-class pursuit of knowledge and literacy and the attempts of the middle-class educators to impose their notion of ‘useful knowledge.’ Dr. Vincent concludes with an assessment of the contribution of autobiography to nineteenth century working class history. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology and literature.
Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.
