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1According to Michel de Certeau, ordinary people may be considered as ‘unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality’. Through the choices and adaptations they make as they confront their world, they draw their own ‘“wandering lines”, their ‘“indirect” or “errant” trajectories obeying their own logic’ (de Certeau xviii). Individuals adapt in a number of different ways that, in the French philosopher’s view, are rarely revolutionary or ostentatious, but instead represent discreet and often unconscious accommodations. In so doing, they follow alternative routes, engage in practices, and produce accounts that bypass traditional channels, and thus reinvent their position in, and experience of, the world and thereby counter grand narratives. Ben Highmore observes that de Certeau’s influential work testifies to the ‘live performativity of the everyday’ (Highmore 13). Building on de Certeau’s insights, I would add that ‘ordinary lives’ are also singular and involve creative ways of acting and thinking. Although the myriad adaptative practices chosen by ordinary people are often moderate and subtle (whether by choice or necessity), their responses to economic, social, political and cultural structures and systems are often unexpected and at times innovative.

2Regrettable though it may be, the lives of ordinary Victorians did not figure prominently in the work of earlier generations of Victorianists. They were more interested in examining the lives of ‘eminent’ great men (and occasionally women) in a Strachey-like approach. Among the most distinguished of the early scholars of Victorian Britain was Asa Briggs. He chose to examine ‘Victorian People’ by selecting extraordinary figures with uncommon destinies. He wrote that ‘the people [he had] chosen are not unknown “men in the street” or forgotten personalities; they are men who made a distinctive contribution to the character of their times’ (Briggs 10). While the examination of such eminent figures continues—and rightly so—, newer approaches have also given room to the exploration of ‘other’ Victorians; people who were not ‘eminent’, but ordinary men and women leading ordinary—but nevertheless fascinating—lives.

What Is an Ordinary Life? Whose Lives Are We Talking about?

  • 1 There is a recent interest in the everyday life of all kinds of people in all kinds of periods and (...)

3For the last three or four decades, research in social history has focused on everyday social practices; with work, death, leisure and domestic life the subjects most frequently addressed.1 In this way, we have learnt a great deal about what non-élite Victorians—of the working and the middle classes—actually did every day. But paradoxically, these studies have sometimes overlooked the people themselves. Ordinary lives have thus often been equated with daily activities, leaving the potential for agency among ordinary people unexplored. A focus on ordinary lives does not of course mean neglecting those everyday activities, and indeed much remains to be discovered on the subject. That being said, there is a strong case for paying much closer attention to the life experiences of ordinary people and exploring how they perceived, and related to, their own world.

4It should be noted that writing about everyday lives involves also highlighting power relations: ‘[research on] everyday life has also been used to side with the dominated against those that would dominate’. For social historians, studying daily life involves examining the ‘practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites’ (Highmore 1). Exploring everyday life is often about making previously invisible lives visible. And those whose lives have been invisibilized, so to speak, due to the inconspicuousness of their existence, the paucity of available historical sources or the mere lack of academic interest (or the combination of several of those elements), are above all the members of the working class.

  • 2 See for example Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English (...)

5Indeed, we know a considerable amount about Victorian middle-class attitudes and behaviour, thanks to their own writings and to scholars’ exploration of a significant number of first-hand accounts.2 But, until recently, we only knew what working-class people of the Victorian era were considered to think, according to various official and institutional sources—reports, interviews, accounts, etc.—that have been collected and examined by social historians. We know much less about what ordinary working-class people really thought and how they really behaved, particularly those who occupied positions towards the bottom of the social hierarchy. An understanding of the lived experience of working-class people—not exactly analogous to their daily life—is arguably of central importance indeed for developing a more nuanced approach towards the study of this social class. It should be borne in mind that around 80 per cent of the British population belonged to the working class, a proportion that remained rather stable over the entire Victorian period (Benson 4). While more is known about the most educated and articulate groups within the working class (sometimes referred to as the skilled working class)—a group more likely to leave written traces, including in some cases autobiographies, diaries or letters—there remain significant gaps in our knowledge about those without access to such means of self-expression: unskilled, casual and itinerant workers, homeworkers, and the poor and the marginalised.

6Ben Highmore’s descriptions of ‘everyday lives’ can be transposed to address ‘ordinary lives’ and particularly those of the numerous forgotten and therefore (to us) unknown individuals. Ordinary life concerns social structures, institutions and power structures which organize daily life. This includes habits and customs which were widely shared among particular groups or communities. But ordinary lives also encompass personal and exceptional endeavours through ‘the agency of individuals in daily life, forms of resistance or non-conformity to social structures’ (Highmore 5). In this second sense, the focus is on personal feeling and experience. An ‘ordinary life approach’ entails the combination of these two meanings, as one navigates between these two aspects of everyday life. In that respect, the ‘ordinary’ may rhyme with compliance, obedience and even conformism; but on occasion it also challenges common assumptions and at times may even threaten social cohesion and power relations. My own research on the ordinary lives of working-class people builds on the coexistence and the co-construction of the general and the particular, institutions and individuals. The extraordinary can be found in the ordinary, as underlined in the introduction to the special Spring 2022 issue of the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens about Victorian popular forms and practices of reading and writing: ‘Ordinary authors, extraordinary writings’.

Down the Path of the Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens

7When looking back at my contributions as author and editor in the CVE, I can map out the route, non-linear but still consistent, that has brought me to the study of ordinary lives. A research path that started with the study of canonical female poets has led me to deviate from my original course and to head off the beaten track, taking me to the margins and sometimes to the limits of literary writings. I now discuss non-canonical literary—and poetical—productions as historical and sociological sources. To put it simply, I focus on what poetry does. I examine the cultural and social practices of some groups through their literary—and above all poetical—productions, and I analyse the ways individuals within these groups conform to what is expected of them and/or, on the contrary, go beyond the limits set out by social and institutional norms.

  • 3La poésie féminine victorienne ou comment donner un sexe aux anges du foyer?’, Cahiers victoriens (...)

8The CVE has witnessed all my thematic and methodological detours, wherever they have taken me. To the lives of ordinary and extraordinary individuals; first, to middle-class women poets and, later, to male poets and poets of the lower classes—those whose names cannot be found in the traditional literary canon. From the authoritative poetic voices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, I turned to less perceptible ones, at least according to our contemporary standards. Dora Greenwell, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Frances Havergal, Michael Field, Dora Sigerson and many others were among the first lesser-known female poets that started populating my Pantheon of the invisible (2004 and 2008). They were followed by Anglo-Catholic poet Adelaide Procter (2012): my first exploration of the social and political role of poetry. An unexpected detour into fiction took me to Elizabeth von Arnim’s garden writings (2013), a non-canonical literary form, which in turn drew me to examining questions of social class that I found necessary to integrate into my gender-oriented approach to literature.3

  • 4 ‘The Politics of Objects: Eliza Cook’s Biographies of Things’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 82 (...)

9A decisive turning point came in 2016, with my article on working-class poet Eliza Cook and on her poems about everyday objects as varied as ‘an armchair, a water-mill, a barn, a clock, a piece of charcoal, . . . a goblet, a seaweed, a church bell, a faggot, . . .’ The study of the ‘auto/biographies’ of some essential daily objects belonging to and epitomizing working-class life led me to consider the poet’s social commitment, and focus on the central role of the biographical in working-class poems. Silent objects were thus given a voice and a social message to deliver. Victorian animals were also to be heard, communicating from their lower social positions. Extinct species, undesirable flies or ready-to-be-consumed ostriches were some of the creatures encountered in the contributions that composed a special issue of the CVE entitled ‘Becoming Animal’. Devoting a whole volume to the place of animals in Victorian culture was a first in the history of the CVE (2017). This research project was complemented by a series of publications in other places on the notion of pedigree in animal poems, which confirmed the sociological and historical shift in my research methodology.4 After a focus on ordinary things and creatures, it was high time to turn to ordinary people.

  • 5 ‘Voices in the Machine: Class, Subjectivity and Desire in Victorian Women’s Factory Poems’, Cahiers (...)

10My two most recent contributions to the CVE deal with ordinary working-class people and more specifically with their popular writings; writings in which social issues such as factory work, poverty and popular education are central. ‘Voices in the machine: Class, Subjectivity and Desire in Victorian Women’s Factory Poems’ (2018) explores how industrial culture shaped the poetical imagination of Victorian women poets. This article confronts the voices of middle-class and working-class women; with each depicting very different images of factory life. Thus, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s depressing and accusatory ‘The Cry of the Children’ (1843) is radically different from ‘Galbraith’s Trip’ (1867), a poem by Ellen Johnston about a joyous outing of Galbraith factory workers taking a boat from Glasgow down the Clyde to Rothesay. My concern with the nature of workers’ relationship with their workplace as an institution, one which functioned both to limit and encourage poetical production, was first tackled in this piece. It also examined the biographical information provided in factory poems and the construction of the author’s ordinary subjectivity, in terms of both collective and individual identity—the two facets of everyday life discussed above by Ben Highmore. Researching and writing this article was a real road-to-Damascus moment for me, and led to a series of contributions elsewhere on workers’ poetical responses to factory work in general and to employer paternalism in particular. The second contribution was the preparation of a special issue on Victorian popular reading and writing forms and practices (2022), co-edited with Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay. ‘Our focus’, we noted, ‘specifically on the minor voices of “ordinary people”, those of the working class, the marginalized, or the undervalued, is to enable the words of the voiceless to be heard and their works to be better known’ (Introduction). The cultural practices of these ordinary people were in fact not ordinary at all, as evidenced in the contributions in that special issue on the lead-miners who created their own library in Allendale and on the London Union of Compositors which launched its own collaborative journal, The Compositors’ Chronicle. This volume prompted a subsequent research project of my own on workers’ poetry as a personal and collective response to work and the workplace as social institutions.5 My current research on the cultural practices of the Victorian paupers and vagrants is closely linked to these two contributions.

Words from Below

  • 6 For example, Peter Bailey on leisure, John K. Walton on popular tourism, Martha Vicinus on cultural (...)

11Individuals who were forgotten or marginalized in different ways and left out of traditional historiography have been a major focus of the history from below approach since the late 1960s. Nineteenth-century social and people’s history has concentrated on the world of work and has documented a large number of work practices (including industrial disputes and workers’ leisure activities). The identity of the working class, as its name suggests, is structured above all by work and social struggles—‘hard times, trade dispute, riot, rebellion, and despair’and by ‘suffering and enduring’ (Steedman 27). But history from below has not only concerned itself with the disastrous causes and effects of industrialisation, as it also deals with resistance, resourcefulness, pride and esprit de corps. Indeed working-class history can also be explored through its cultural practices that are often indicators of such small successes.6

  • 7 Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) and Breadwinne (...)
  • 8 More than a thousand popular autobiographies have been collected by John Burnett, David Mayall and (...)

12The ‘new’ social history that has emerged in recent decades adds value to the ordinary lives of the working class by giving pride of place to the workers’ own words.7 Historians of the working class—and particularly scholars in the field of women’s history—have relied on many different kinds of personal sources that complement more traditional historical material. Autobiographies,8 memoirs, diaries, letters, poems—all ego-documents—are key historical sources, facilitating our access to what ordinary people thought and felt. Ego-documents allow us to further our knowledge of daily lives as they are sometimes more faithful to what people really experienced than other less personal sources.

The Resources of Poetry

13My own contribution to the field has been to add the resources of working-class poetry. Contrary to what might be thought, writing and publishing poetry was never limited to the most educated and privileged circles. Poetry writing in the mid- and late Victorian periods was a common, ‘ordinary’ practice among the members of the working class, as Kirstie Blair’s research on working-class poetry has made clear. ‘We have often failed to recognize’, she writes, ‘… both how important and influential this culture of local poetic production was, as a major component of “Victorian literature” and in the everyday lives of writers and readers; and how relevant it might be to our twenty-first century concerns’ (Blair 3).

  • 9 A certain number of the poets I study were not proper ‘industrial workers’. Some of them were clerk (...)

14My own corpus is composed of popular poetry,9 written by little-known, forgotten, socially invisible or anonymous individuals-turned-poets. But the poems written in ordinary circumstances were also produced by exceptional individuals who produced their poetry in incredibly difficult social conditions and managed to create original and inventive poems. This is the case of Chartist supporter Eliza Cook, Scottish factory girl Ellen Johnston, Halifax workhouse inmate Grace Dickinson and homeless man Bow Street. These are four ‘specimens’ of working-class culture and four improbable poets who documented the living conditions of their class but, above all, they described their own personal experiences and feelings in their own words and with their own poetic resources.

  • 10 See Kirstie Blair, The Poets of the People’s Journal (2016) and Victorian Scotland. Poetry, Press, (...)

15Following in the footsteps of Kirstie Blair, Florence Boos, Brian Maidment and Mike Sanders (and others) who have made a major contribution to recovering, disseminating and highlighting working-class poetry,10 I focus on poems produced on the margins of ordinary life and in the interstices of institutional time and space; times and spaces hardly conducive, at least on the face of it, to literary creation. I have a special interest in improbable poetical writings that emerged in—apparently—unproductive environments like the workplace, the workhouse, or even the street. Most poems in this category are short—no longer than a few stanzas. This reflects the fact that many such authors lived on borrowed time, had little money, personal space and motivation, and were subject to peer pressure. Some of these poems ended up in books or anthologies, thanks to the exceptional literary and at times marketing talent of their authors, but also due to the efforts of generous editors and publishers. The majority of such poems were inserted in press articles; not always used as fillers, but not always printed in their entirety either. Poems of this kind were often ephemeral and fragile. In fact, they were just as vulnerable as their authors!

Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries

  • 11 In ‘Immediate Accidents and Lingering Trauma: Railwaymen Poets, Danger, and Emotive Verse’, Oliver (...)

16Now that working-class autobiographies and letters are acknowledged as legitimate and indeed valuable sources for historians, it is high time to recognise the potential of poems that lend themselves to an interdisciplinary methodology. I would argue that such works too can be used as historical sources, with their significant biographical insights and as sources of information on topical—local or national—issues. Like diaries and letters, they are likely to offer an even more direct connection with people’s lives than autobiographies, with the latter providing a retrospective view on past events, sometimes decades after they happened. Without overlooking the obvious subjectivity of poems and the potential modifications brought by editors and publishers, it is important to note that the former are generally rather spontaneous responses to current events; to major and disastrous events like railway accidents (Kinnersley Lewis’s 1892 ‘The Song of the Signalman’)11 or mine explosions (‘The Trimdon Grange Explosion’ in the 1890s by Tommy Armstrong aka ‘the Pitman Poet’), or to minor and joyous ones, like communal events organized in factories (Ellen Johnston’s 1867 ‘Tennants’ Excursion. Most respectfully dedicated to the workmen by E. J. the factory girl’). As poetry was a social and cultural—often collective—phenomenon among nineteenth-century workers, it is also helpful to reconstruct the sociological background of Victorian working-class groups, for example their relationships with social institutions. The spatial turn has demonstrated that space and place play a central role in social science, in helping us understand the relationships of humans to their social and physical environment. Therefore poems give us clues as to how their authors interacted with their local—sometimes restricted—social spaces; spaces which nevertheless proved to be propitious ones in terms of the emergence of literary writings.

  • 12 This quote is borrowed from the special issue of Journal of Victorian Culture about working-life li (...)

17Ordinary people’s poems also have something to say about the lived experience of their authors. Indeed, poems emerged in, and thanks to, very specific contexts—historical, social, physical and institutional. The depiction of the interactions with the local environment, added to the biographical elements given in each poem, offer vital clues to ordinary people’s sensibilities. As a matter of fact, poems provide information about their authors’ feelings, precisely because they are literary creations, laden with emotional force, speaking volumes about working-class literary cultures. Since we know so little about ordinary people’s emotional life and psychology, poems can offer valuable insights. The resourcefulness of the poetic language (not all poems have formulaic turns of phrase and conventional rhyming patterns), when studied alongside other sources, can reveal some of what is missing in factual reports. A poem written in, say, a Yorkshire textile mill in the 1860s, is likely to provide valuable micro-historical information about the industrial sector in question: workplace organisation and relationships, shop-floor politics and culture, and so on. All of which is immensely valuable for the social historian. Such sources will, moreover, also offer valuable evidence on workers’ feelings and emotions with regard to their employers, their co-workers, the machines, tools and materials they used, and their sensory environment. This knowledge is important both for the historian of sensibilities, (for whom the notion of universal emotions is anathema), and for the literary scholar who is concerned with the specifics of non-canonical poets ‘actively engaged in trying to develop an aesthetic capable of capturing their experience’ (Blair and Sanders).12

Institutional Poetics

18Working-class poetry is the creative result of groups living and working in shared spaces and within their own cultures. The analysis of poems as sources of history and literary creation leads us therefore to identify specific groups sharing common features and spaces that are conducive to the emergence of writing. However restrictive these institutions may have been, they offered an environment which turns out to have been conducive to the creation of popular circles and networks of poetic creation, supported in some cases by the local press and by patronage. Institutions like jails, factories, hospitals, and relief institutions even saw the emergence of poetic subgenres like prison poems, factory poems, hospital poems or workhouse poems… And such institutions contributed to the emergence of talents. Indeed, poets writing in institutions acquired a form of agency in, and, paradoxically, thanks to, a system that sought to control them. The relationship with the institution was actually both internalized and exploited by the residents of the institutions. It was not uncommon for factories to have their own local poetic celebrities, and even for workhouses to have their local ‘poet laureates’, proud to contribute their own creations in verse. Bethnal Green workhouse inmate Mungo Paumier is a case in point. He gained a certain notoriety among readers of the local press owing to his repeated use of letters to voice his complaints, but his fame was also linked to the persona he constructed as a successful workhouse poet. He even had the rare opportunity of having one of his poems, ‘Hope Deferred’, published in full in 1871 in the East London Observer.

Perspectives on Ordinary Lives

19A surprisingly large number of ordinary Victorians—and among them some emerging poets—walking daily through factory doors and workhouse gates, left some traces of their passage on paper. But the sources produced in other institutions remain to be explored in order to recover the cultural and poetical practices of their members: prisoners, patients, civil servants and . . . vagabonds. Vagrants’ writings are hard to identify for obvious material reasons, but it is not impossible to uncover the traces, even poetic ones, left by them in casual wards or in other relief institutions. Gathering literary sources from Victorian ‘rogues and vagabonds’ sometimes resembles an obstacle course, given the paucity of sources and the doubts about their authenticity. But some of my initial research in this area has already begun to bear fruit, with the discovery of a number of personal writings (autobiographies, letters and poems).

  • 13 Exceptions are to be found on certain prison walls. First preserved as testimonials, graffiti is no (...)
  • 14 See Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Le plancher de Joachim : l’histoire retrouvée d’un village français ( (...)

20A large proportion of the poems I study were produced in traditional formats—mostly in books and newspapers. In contrast, poems written in the form of graffiti on the walls of institutions have not been preserved as tangible objects,13 but fortunately some were kept in official documents to be used as testimonials, such as Bow Street’s poem ‘Dry bread in the morning, ditto at night’. There may be other, even less likely, material forms. In his Palimpsests of Prisons (1888), Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso collected hundreds of examples of prison graffiti, a significant number of them written in poetic form on walls, furniture, and objects. But more interestingly, he also copied a selection of tattoos on prisoners’ bodies, some of them in poetic form. The connections between the body, the poetic form, the message and carceral institutions have yet to be explored. With a bit of luck, ordinary people’s verse testimonials may be discovered in other ordinary, yet improbable, forms and locations. French carpenter Joachim Martin wrote a diary between 1880 and 1881 on the back of the floorboards of a French Alpine chateau. Its discovery in 1999 provided insights into the private lives of some villagers.14 There may be other good surprises in verse waiting to be found in other incredible locales.

21Martin’s inscribed floorboards tell us much about the villagers’ little secrets, but very little about the man’s working practices, his gestures or the feel of his materials and tools. Initial findings from my research examining working-class poems by French and English artisans has shown that a significant number have a lot to say on these themes. Another approach is to explore other ‘eminent’ ordinary lives which, by definition, have slipped below the literary radar. Extra research in the local press and in other archival material will no doubt reveal the existence of other talented poets of the people. This research may also lead to further collaborative work on various ego-documents or on other formal or informal literary forms, working with scholars also seeking to recover the warp and weft of the past lives of ordinary people.

22I wish to thank Neil Davie for his advice on earlier versions of this article.

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Bibliographie

Benson, John. The Working Class in Britain, 1850-1939. London and New York: Longman, 1989.

Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Scotland. Poetry, Press, Community. Oxford: OUP, 2019.

Blair, Kirstie, and Mike Sanders, ‘Introduction to “Roundtable: Piston, Pen & Press”’. Journal of Victorian Culture 28.3 (2023): 389‒94.

Briggs, Asa. 1975. Victorian People. A Reassessment of People, Institutions Ideas and Events 1851-1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Stephen Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Highmore, Ben, ed. The Everyday Life Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Steedman, Carolyn. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class. Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2013.

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Notes

1 There is a recent interest in the everyday life of all kinds of people in all kinds of periods and places. The publications related to the everyday life of the Victorians are extensive. And it is probably no coincidence that most are written by women historians. See for example Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (1996); Melinda Corey and George Ochoa, The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World: a Reader's Companion to the People, Places, Events and Everyday Life of the Victorian Era (1996); Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City (2005); Judith Flanders, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London; Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class. Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (2013); and Amy Helen, Everyday Life in Victorian London (2023).

2 See for example Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780‒1850 (1987) and Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (1992).

3La poésie féminine victorienne ou comment donner un sexe aux anges du foyer?’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 59 (2004); ‘“Anywhere out of this room”: les poèmes énigmatiques des poétesses victoriennes’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 67 (2008); ‘“A Woman’s Answer”: Adelaide Procter et la poésie face au genre’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 75 (2012); ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’s Garden Memoirs: Cultivating Feminism?’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 77 (2013).

4 ‘The Politics of Objects: Eliza Cook’s Biographies of Things’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 82 (2016); ‘Becoming Animal’, special issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 85 (2017).

5 ‘Voices in the Machine: Class, Subjectivity and Desire in Victorian Women’s Factory Poems’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 87 (2018); ‘Victorian Popular Forms and Practices of Reading and Writing’, special issue of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 95 (2022).

6 For example, Peter Bailey on leisure, John K. Walton on popular tourism, Martha Vicinus on cultural practices and communities in the workplace, Jonathan Rose and Martyn Lyons on reading cultures, Patrick Joyce on the workers’ political and cultural life, etc.

7 Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) and Breadwinner. An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (2020); Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (2007); Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010); Fabrice Bensimon, Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815‒1870 (2023).

8 More than a thousand popular autobiographies have been collected by John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent and are held at the Burnett Collection of working-class autobiographies at Brunel University. See the three-volume critical annotated bibliography they compiled: The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989).

9 A certain number of the poets I study were not proper ‘industrial workers’. Some of them were clerks, some did not have a regular job, others were paupers or even vagrants…

10 See Kirstie Blair, The Poets of the People’s Journal (2016) and Victorian Scotland. Poetry, Press, Community (2019); Florence Boos, Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain: An Anthology (2008); Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (1987); Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (2013).

11 In ‘Immediate Accidents and Lingering Trauma: Railwaymen Poets, Danger, and Emotive Verse’, Oliver Betts analyses this poem as well as many others on the same subject and explores the place of railway accident poetry in Victorian culture (Journal of Victorian Culture 28.3, 2023).

12 This quote is borrowed from the special issue of Journal of Victorian Culture about working-life literary cultures with a focus on poetry (Journal of Victorian Culture 28.3 (2023).

13 Exceptions are to be found on certain prison walls. First preserved as testimonials, graffiti is now protected and in some cases has become part of our cultural heritage. See for example Emmanuel Fureix, « Écrire l’histoire de résistances graphiques : graffitis d’insurgés prisonniers au mitan du 19e siècle », 20 & 21. Revue d'histoire 2022/4, 156, 41-58.

14 See Jacques-Olivier Boudon, Le plancher de Joachim : l’histoire retrouvée d’un village français (2017).

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Fabienne Moine, « Ordinary Lives »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 100 Automne | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15150 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/132ra

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Auteur

Fabienne Moine

Fabienne Moine is Professor of British Studies at the University of Paris Est Créteil (France). Her research interests associate Victorian poetry and social history. Her recent research is about popular verse, produced ‘from below’ by workers or paupers in social institutions. She seeks to identify the social conditions around the emergence of literary writings in working-class environments and to reconstruct a history of everyday life through cultural practices.
Fabienne Moine est professeure de civilisation britannique à l’Université Paris Est Créteil. Sa recherche porte sur l’histoire sociale à l’époque victorienne à travers l’exploration des productions culturelles dont la poésie, analysée comme pratique sociale. Ses recherches récentes concernent la poésie populaire et ouvrière produite au sein des institutions victoriennes de secours, comme les workhouses ou les asiles.

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