Piston, Pen and Press (Literature, Culture and the Victorian Industrial Worker)

Based on extensive research into little-known archives this book argues that a significant proportion of Victorian industrial workers contributed to local literary culture, as writers, readers and participants in associational culture. This study concentrates on the three occupational groups at the forefront of large-scale industrial development – textile factory workers, miners, and railway workers. It argues that, for these workers, the industrial workplace created and fostered new forms of engagement with literature and culture. Additionally, it shows that working-class literary production – especially, though not exclusively, poetry – provides a means of investigating how industrial workers represented their own labour, their working communities, and their sense of identity. It combines case-studies of places, publications, occupations and associations to document the richness and variety of Victorian and Edwardian working-class literature.