The Invisibility of Working-Class Self-Representation in Literary Classrooms, with a Focus on the Romantic-Period

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of the representation of working-class life in the most-used teaching anthologies of the last sixty years, focusing especially on the British Romantic period. Falke reads the underrepresentation of working-class writing in this crucial period as a particularly egregious example of a pervasive trend: in the academy working people are spoken about more than listened to, more written about than seen. Contrasting Romantic-period coverage of the 1960s with today, one finds dramatic changes in the representation of women writers and writing related to slavery and orientalism, but almost no change in the representation of British working-class authors and issues. Falke emphasizes the centrality of working-class literary culture to the Romantic period and the importance of this period to the growth of working-class consciousness. She speculates about what factors might prevent working-class writing, particularly autobiographical narratives, from obtaining visibility in the academy. Discussing the innovativeness of autobiographical works by Robert Blincoe, a factory worker, and Christopher Thompson, a house painter, she suggests that a revision of our expectations for autobiography can facilitate a re-evaluation of an important body of work by working-class authors. Since the balance of genres and authors taught as representing a period reflects the ideology of the present, as well as the past, Falke argues that the virtual invisibility of class as a factor impeding access to the public sphere in the nineteenth century contributes to the ongoing occlusion of class in today’s politics of visibility.