"I was an atom in the world of life": James Dawson Burn's The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (original) (raw)
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History Compass, 2011
Author's Introduction Histories of the experience of poverty are hampered in the period before widespread literacy, owing to the infrequency with which the words of the poor could be inscribed privately and the mediated qualities of public or third-party recordings (for example, where testimony was given by the poor in their capacity as defendants in criminal trials). Yet comprehension of the gradations of material poverty, and the social allegiances or divisions that it inspired, are vital to our understanding of nineteenth-century society and can reveal some surprising disjunctions in what we think we know. Jane Humphries' recent research on autobiographies recalling child labour, for instance, presses for a refocusing of our attention on the role of children in the industrial revolution. Therefore, a programme of work which considers the perceptions and experiences of poverty by drawing on first-person testimonies can provide detailed insight into lived experience, and has the potential to destabilise our assumptions about the mass of ordinary working people.
Depictions of the “Ideal Child” in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Legislature
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
Generations of readers are familiar with the child characters who populate the works of Charles Dickens: the innocent (but hungry) Oliver Twist, and happy-go-lucky urchin the Artful Dodger, quietly suffering Little Nell, and poor crippled Tiny Tim. Some may even know that Dickens researched the social veracity of his settings, avidly reading the Parliamentary "Blue Books" which reported debates on the Children's Employment Commission and the Poor Law, and visiting a mine to see working conditions for himself. He was not the only author to take his subject matter so seriously: the poet Elizabeth Barrett used information given to her by one of the Sub-Commissioners of the Factory Acts to construct her 1843 poem "The Cry of the Children", and Frances Milton Trollope visited Lancashire to get a first-hand impression of the conditions there before writing The Life And Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840).1 Clearly, it was important to these authors that they capture a sense of social reality in their work, however unpalatable that might be. The popularity of some of these works also suggests that readers did not shy away from "difficult" topics; in fact they made for good fiction, at least for adult readers. Scholars have written much less about how the lives of poor children were depicted in novels written for children. This is the stance we take in this article. We have adopted an inter-disciplinary approach to examine the commonalities and disjunctures in the way that the working-class young were described in what can loosely be called "policy" sources-the Parliamentary enquiries into children's industrial work in the 1830s and 40s-which were aimed at an educated and largely adult audience, compared with fiction published for a
‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’1: First-Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900
History Compass, 2011
Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write 'history from below', in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first-person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil the function of personal narratives in histories of the poor, in that they contain biographical and coincidental detail about families, occupations, health and political engagement. Working-class autobiographies survive in numbers from the eighteenth century onwards, and were not necessarily produced by the literate (as some were recorded at the author's dictation). Official documents such as settlement examinations and correspondence generated by the workings of the English poor laws offer truncated access to similar information. Histories of the poor may now strive to amplify the voices of their subjects, albeit while observing the muffling effects of each genre.
Childhood narratives in Contemporary Irish Novels
Études irlandaises, 2015
The image of childhood as reflected through literature has evolved through time and places, even though it is almost intrinsic to autobiography and is essential to the genre of the Bildungsroman. Childhood narratives do not only allow writers to convey a critique of society as seen through the eyes of an naive, innocent child, or to explore the roots of their own artistic vocation. They also represent a challenge for the writer who has to invent or imitate the language of a character who is not yet in full command of words. In Ireland, one of the master childhood narratives is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen Dedalus discovers language in his early childhood and later decides to become an artist working with words. This article studies four contemporary Irish childhood narratives which each in its own way exemplify the main features of the genre: Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke HaHaHa, Claire Keegan's Foster and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy.The interest of these four novels lies in their concern not just with he representation of childhood but also with the recreation of a specific language associated with this period of life.
Autobiografiction: Experimental Life-Writing from the Turn of the Century to Modernism 1
Literature Compass, 2009
This essay approaches the large but surprisingly under-theorized topic of the relation between autobiography and fiction, concentrating on the period between 1880 and 1930, arguing for a new account of the relation between Modernism and life-writing. It introduces and analyses a key essay from 1906 by Stephen Reynolds, author of A Poor Man’s House, which, strikingly, coins the post-modern-sounding term ‘autobiografiction’. It argues that Reynolds’ central concept sheds light on the vexed theoretical question of the relation between autobiography and fiction, and in ways that reach further than either Reynolds or the essay’s few commentators have appreciated; in short, that ‘autobiografiction’ is potentially a much vaster topic than his essay countenances. The second section discusses the significance of the concept of ‘autobiografiction’ from the points of view of literary history and literary theory. It argues that Reynolds’ essay not only offers a powerful analysis of the literature of the previous quarter-century, but also suggests how the literature of the following decades – of Modernism – can be reconsidered in its light. Such attention enables a re-description of Modernism: instead of the conventional account of its quest for the impersonal, the movement can be seen as developing these fin-de-siècle experiments in fusing life-writing and fiction. Reynolds’ essay appears at a pivotal moment as Edwardian authors such as Edmund Gosse evince an anxious awareness of the radical potential of autobiografiction; and when Modernists such as Joyce and Proust embark on their most profound engagements with it: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and A la recherche du temps perdu. The essay goes on to argue that the issues raised by Reynolds enable a more sophisticated theoretical approach to the relation between autobiography and fiction, and explores the ambiguities which inhere in the term ‘autobiographical’ when applied to fictional works. Where Reynolds outlines the rationale for autobiografiction in fairly defensive terms, I argue for an appreciation of its radical potentialities. The study concludes by considering the trope, identified by Philippe Lejeune in Modernism, but here traced back to Aestheticism, that fiction constitutes a writer’s true autobiography. This is placed in a broader philosophical and aesthetic context of reading fiction as autobiography, and autobiography as fiction.
The Excess of Autobiography: Texts, Paratexts, Contexts
2016
This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.