John Goodridge

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · Department of English

A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'...

On 19 March 1826, John Clare wrote to Alaric Watts, a literary editor, responding delicately to what had evidently been an offer to choose a gift of books: I can hardly have the face to state as you desire me what books I like as I do not wish to intrude on the kindness of any one or else I have long desired to see the Poems of ‘Miss Landon’ which...

The essay examines a poetical description of a Yorkshire workhouse, from John Dyer's georgic poem The Fleece (1757), in which Dyer describes child labour and the use of textile processing machines recently invented by Lewis Paul. Reviewing the uses textile and other specialists historians have made of this passage and its comparative neglect by lit...

Although Clare and Keats never met or directly corresponded, they were close contemporaries with much in common, including a publisher and overlapping literary circles and interests. Moreover, they passed messages to each other via their publisher John Taylor, and the evidence suggests a significant level of literary and personal engagement between...

The study of labouring-class poetry began for me with the excitement of discovery, first via an association copy of Chatterton’s Rowley Poems inherited from a great-grandfather (see Goodridge 2004), then as a belatedly precocious mature student, happy to discover my own new poets from the past with a little help from my patient lecturers. Taking my...

The poet John Clare complained that his fellow villagers were "insensible to every thing but toiling & talking & that to no purpose" (Letters, ed. Mark Storey [Oxford, 1985], 230). The volume under review consists entirely of talk about toil, but vividly demonstrates how what might irritate a young poet—small talk about weather and livestock and th...

stephen duck;undergraduate courses;comparative study;first-hand account;verse

In his pioneering presentation of Victorian self-taught poets and poetry, The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Brian Maidment organizes his material into three principal areas: "Chartists and Radicals," "The Parnassians," and "Lowly Bards and Homely Writers." Editing my own volume of Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1860–1900, I found t...

The eighteenth-century English georgic poem was a compendious form and incorporated a wealth of information on many subjects, including agriculture. This essay considers an example taken from one of these poems: a description of the fat-tailed 'Carmenian' sheep from John Dyer's The Fleece (1757). Comparing this with portrayals of this type of sheep...

Like the thresher poet Stephen Duck a century earlier, John Clare (1793- 1864) has always had a place in the literary histories, if only as a biographical footnote. Clare’s confinement in the Northampton Asylum in 1841, and Duck’s apparent suicide by drowning in 1756, helped to turn these authors, and many like them, into object lessons on the peri...

Samuel Johnson considered that Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard ‘abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’. Roger Lonsdale argues that it ‘produces fewer or more complicated echoes in the bosoms of modern readers than in those of earlier generations’, but it is not ju...

This is a lightly annotated summary of material, especially poctry, which responds creatively to Thomas Chatte rton. While Chatterton is central to the marority of items listed, his fleeting presence in poems, novels, etc., is also recorded, though more selectively. Although it is rather fuller than earlier lists, it cannot be exhaustive, so that f...