Sample proposal: major works
This proposal is a useful guide, and it is interesting to see how it developed after it was accepted.
English Labouring-Class Poets 1700-1900
two editions of three volumes each
I: English Labouring-Class Poets 1700-1800 in three volumes
II: English Labouring-Class Poets 1801-1900 in three volumes
EDITORS
John Goodridge, Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University: General Editor and Editor. Goodridge is the author of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge, 1996) and has written numerous articles on self-taught authors including, notably, Thomas Chatterton and John Clare. He is the editor of the John Clare Society Journal, on the Editorial Board of the Trent Editions, and has edited, most recently, the works of Robert Bloomfield, John Dyer, and John Clare. In addition, Goodridge has served as editor to two scholarly collections, The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition (1994) and the forthcoming John Clare: New Approaches, New Voices.
Tim Burke, Lecturer, St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill: Editor. Burke has published several essays on Ann Yearsley and is preparing a book-length study titled Parody in English Romanticism: Excluded Voices and Literary Culture.
William Christmas, Assistant Professor, San Francisco State University: Editor. Christmas is completing a monograph titled The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and Class in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830 which will be published by University of Delaware Press. His articles on Henry Jones and James Woodhouse will appear in the New DNB.
Bridget Keegan, Assistant Professor Creighton University: Editor. Keegan has published essays on the work of Stephen Duck, Thomas Chatterton and John Clare. She is the editor, with James McKusick, of the forthcoming anthology Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of British and American Nature Writing (Prentice Hall, 2000). She is currently completing a book entitled Poets Born and Made: The English Self-Taught Tradition, 1729-1837.
Kaye Kossick, Associate Lecturer, University of Northumbria at Newcastle: Editor. Kossick has published several essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins. She has also published work on John Clare and on Kathleen Jamie and works extensively on nineteenth-century self-taught women authors and vernacular verse.
Scott McEathron, Associate Professor, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale: Editor. McEathron's essays on various aspects of British Romanticism have appeared in The Keats-Shelley Journal, Victorians Institute Journal, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, and the Blackwell Companion to Romanticism. His article "Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry," forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature, is a part of his current book project, 'Pastoral Fancies': Wordsworth and the Peasant Poet Tradition.
David Fairer, Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature, University of Leeds: Consulting Editor. Fairer is the author of Pope's Imagination (Manchester, 1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Penguin, 1989), and, as editor, Pope: New Contexts (Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990), and The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (Georgia, 1995); he has also written the introduction and appendices to a facsimile edition of Warton's History of English Poetry (Routledge, 1998). He has written widely on Sensibility and eighteenth-century Romanticism. With Christine Gerrard, he has edited Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 1999), and is writing English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century for the Longman Literature in English Series.
RATIONALE
Considering the tremendous scholarly attention being given to expanding the canon of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, it is surprising that only a few of the over 100 poets from labouring-class origins publishing in this period have made their way into mainstream anthologies. Roger Lonsdale's New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and his Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989) brought those authors whom he labeled "submerged" into focus within the larger landscape of verse in the period.
Lonsdale included carefully-chosen excerpts from the works of economically and educationally marginalized authors alongside the standard canonical texts of Pope, Thomson and Wordsworth. Yet Lonsdale's selections, important as they are, represent a very small portion of the great variety of poetry produced by poets from the lower ranks of English society. More recent anthologies, such as Robert DeMaria's British Literature, 1640-1789 (Blackwell, 1996) and David Fairer's and Christine Gerrard's Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Blackwell, 1998) continue Lonsdale's aims by including more selections of working-class authors than in previous collections, but again, do not consider them apart from the mainstream of bourgeois and aristocratic literary production. Because of the important work these editions have done to increase the academic community's awareness of the range and vitality of labouring-class poetry, the time has come to represent these writers not as minor reflections of, or the context for, "greater" authors. Rather, what is needed is a collection which will represent these poets as a group who shared similar experiences, challenges, pitfalls and successes. What is required is a collection that will show these writers as a separate – though parallel – tradition in which we can trace unique thematic and formal concerns which are not necessarily apparent when these authors are "submerged" into the literary mainstream.
These individual voices should be allowed for once to set their own context and agenda and to be judged in the company of their peers. There is an intense desire among scholars to bring forward new voices from the period, and we now have a special opportunity to produce an authoritative series of volumes. By providing a collection comprised solely of the work of labouring-class authors, these volumes will allow readers and scholars to hear the many strong voices that have too long been silenced.
The need to hear these long-muted voices has been a persistent academic concern. Although seminal critical studies such as Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973) and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) have firmly established the significance of the works of these writers, scholars, students and general readers must travel to a few major research collections to read their work in full. Exceptional recent criticism of women working-class authors (Donna Landry's The Muses of Resistance [Cambridge, 1990] or Moira Ferguson's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets [SUNY, 1995] as well as several single author studies (Richard Greene's Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry [Oxford, 1993] or Mary Waldron's study of Ann Yearsley [Georgia, 1996]) further argue the relevance, timeliness, and public need for making available the work of these writers, and others like them, who wrote from and about a labouring-class perspective. John Goodridge's highly-acclaimed Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge, 1996) establishes Stephen Duck and Mary Collier as significant contributors to the eighteenth-century georgic tradition. In nineteenth-century studies, Ann Janowitz's recent and well-received study Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, 1998) calls for an expanding knowledge of Romantic labouring-class poets beyond Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns and John Clare. Janowitz argues that we need to see these poets not just in relationship to canonical authors but alongside the labouring-class writers who preceded and succeeded them. Janowitz builds upon the claims of other scholars who have stressed the need to redress Romantic-period exclusions, such as Mary Favret and Nicola Watson in At The Limits of Romanticism (Indiana, 1994) and John Whale and Stephen Copley in Beyond Romanticism (Routledge, 1992).
The proposed series would break new ground by making available to the general reading public the wide variety of poetry written by men and women of labouring-class origins in this two hundred year period. Except for a few fine single author editions of only a few of the poets (Mary Leapor, Robert Bloomfield, and John Clare), as well as some rare and hard to find reprints, usually of individual poems (Stephen Duck and Mary Collier, Isabella Lickbarrow, Ann Yearsley), the only other attempt made to anthologize the broad spectrum of poetry produced by labouring-class authors is Brian Maidment's Poorhouse Fugitives (1987). While this Carcanet edition (available only in the UK) is a landmark, it is devoted only to male Victorian-era writers and its thematic arrangement does not necessarily allow for a sense of individual authors' complete achievement. The proposed volumes would be the first ever to represent the richness, variety and complexity of the work of labouring-class authors.English Labouring-Class Poetry will be an important collection with both literary and socio-historical relevance. It will recover a literature that was hugely popular and important in its day. For example, the sales of certain collections (such as Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy or Clare's Poems Descriptive) rivalled or exceeded the previous sales records of poetry in Britain.
The collection aims to make available poetry that will facilitate the important scholarly work of recovery and canon revision. In addition, it will serve as a contribution to broader historical and cultural research on the labouring classes in England, making the series of interest to historians, social scientists and other scholars of the period, including those interested in class; formalism and aesthetics; the demographics of literacy; the reading public; nationalism; labour; intellectual history; British political history; literary influence; canon formation; publishing history -- to name only a few fields. These volumes are certain to appeal to scholars of English neoclassicism, Romanticism and Victorianism and to the libraries which serve them. They would attract a more general reading audience, such as the nearly 1000 members internationally of the John Clare Society.
We firmly believe that the re-publication of this body of work will dramatically reshape a whole series of critical conceptions and assumptions about eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, society, and literary culture.
FORMAT, APPARATUS AND GENERAL TEXTUAL PRINCIPLES
We propose two editions of three volumes and organized chronologically.The first edition will concentrate on the eighteenth century and the second on the nineteenth. Each volume would consist of an introduction to the works and authors contained therein (approximately 4,000 words), a short chronology of the period each volume covers, with separate brief introductions to each author's work (approximately 500-750 words). Each volume would conclude with endnotes and an index of titles and first lines. Also at the end of each volume, information about textual variants would be provided in summary form, as an appendix.
The first volume in each of the two series would contain a substantive historical and theoretical introduction to the series as a whole, providing a thorough overview of developments in labouring-class poetry for that century written by General Editor John Goodridge. This essay in each of these first volumes would stand as a definitive treatment of the importance of the works of the labouring-class tradition in that century.
For each author contained in the series, the editors would work, wherever possible, to reproduce the contents of the original full texts produced by each author, including any important prefatory or biographical prose materials (often essential to a reading of the poetry which follows). Where this is not possible, either due to page constraints or duplication of individual poems in distinct texts, major sections of text would be reprinted, with indication that such a procedure had been followed. Excerpting portions of poems, unless absolutely necessary, would be avoided. Editors will annotate unfamiliar word usage, literary allusion or historical reference, but they will interfere as little as possible with the text's original spelling, punctuation or capitalization.
Obvious errors and misprints will be silently corrected. The goal of the editors will be to present texts that are at once accessible to a modern audience, but which importantly respect and retain the distinctive traits of the poetry as it was originally published in the period. Issues of "correctness" and "elegance" are especially significant for labouring-class poets, thus any idiosyncrasies in the poetry ought to be preserved.
Editors, following recent scholarship on the communal and social process of publication, will draw on the earliest published versions of works, except where there is no early publication or when newspaper contributions or manuscript materials alert the editors to distortions imposed by patrons.
PROVISIONAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volumes will be arranged chronologically. Authors will be presented according to the publication date of their first published editions.
First Series: Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800
General Editor: John Goodridge
Volume I: 1700-1739
Editor: William Christmas
Edward Ward, Works (1703-9)
Jane Holt Wiseman, A Fairy Tale (1717)
Robert Dodsley, Servitude: A Poem (1729) and A Muse in Livery (1732)
Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Subjects (1730), Poems on Several Occasions (1736)
John Bancks, The Weaver's Miscellany (1730), Miscellaneous Poems (1738)
Mary Masters, Poems on Several Occasions (1733), Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions (1755)
Robert Tatersal, The Bricklayer's Miscellany (2 vols., 1734-5)
Mary Collier, The Woman's Labour (1739), Poems on Several Occasions (1762)
Volume II: 1740-1779
Editor: Bridget Keegan
Henry Jones, The Bricklayer's Poem (1745), Poems on Several Occasions (1749), "The Relief, or Day Thoughts" (1754), Kew Garden (1763)
George Smith Green, The Parson's Parlor (1756)
James Eyre Weeks, The Cobler's Poem (1745)
Elizabeth Teft, Orinthia's Miscellany (1747)
Mary Leapor, Poems on Several Occasions (2 vols., 1748-51)
Joseph Lewis, Lancelot Poverty Struck (1758)
William Vernon, Poems on Several Occasions (1758)
James Woodhouse, Poems on Sundry Occasions (1764), Poems on Several Occasions (1788),
Norbury Park (1803), The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (1896)
John Bennet, Poems on Several Occasions (1774)
John Lucas, Miscellanies (1776), The Fall of Pharaoh and Philo's Apology (1781)
Ann Wilson, Teisa: A Descriptive Poem (1778), Jepthah's Daughter: A Dramatic Poem (1783)
Vol III: 1780-1800
Editor: Tim Burke
Susannah Harrison, Songs in the Night (1780)
John Freeth, Warwickshire Medley (1780), A Touch of the Times (1790)
Christopher Jones, Miscellaneous Poetic Attempts (1782)
Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (1785), Poems on Various Subjects (1787)
John Frederick Bryant, Verses (1787)
Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Ammon (1789)
Elizabeth Bentley, Genuine Poetical Compositions on Various Subjects (1791)
John Foster, Poems Chiefly on Religious Subjects (1797)
Robert Anderson, Poems on Various Subjects (1798)
Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer's Boy (1800), Rural Tales (1802), Wild Flowers (1806), May-Day with the Muses (1822)
Edward Rushton, Poems and Other Writings (reprinted 1824)
Second Series: Nineteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, 1801-1900
General Editor: John Goodridge
Vol. I: 1801-1830
Editor: Scott McEathron
Ann Candler, Poetical Attempts (1803)
Isabella Lickbarrow, Poetical Effusions (1814)
Ebeneezer Elliott, Night (1818), Love (1823), The Corn Law Rhymes (1834), The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott (1840)
John Clare, Poems Descriptive (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), The Rural Muse (1835)
Robert Millhouse, Blossoms (1823), Song of the Patriot (1826), Sherwood Forest (1827), The Destinies of Man (1832)
Robert Franklin, The Miller's Muse (1824)
Allen Davenport, The Muses' Wreath (1827)
Henry Brown, The Mechanic's Saturday Night (1830), Saint Monday (1833), Sunday, A Poem (1835)
Vol. II: 1831-1860
Editor: Kaye Kossick
John Jones, Attempts in Verse (1831)
Mary Maria Colling, Fables and Other Pieces in Verse (1831)
Robert Story, Love and Literature (1842)
Robert Nicoll, The Poems of Robert Nicoll (1842)
Samuel Bamford, Homely Rhymes, Poems and Reminiscences (1843)
George Richardson, Patriotism and Other Poems (1844)
Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides (1845)
Gerald Massey, The Ballad of Babe Christabel, with other Lyrical Poems (1854)
Elijah Ridings, The Village Muse-The Complete Poetical Works of Elijah Ridings (1854)
Ernest Jones, The Battle Day and Other Poems (1855)
John Critchley Prince, Hours With the Muses (1857)
Vol. III: 1861-1900
Editor: John Goodridge
Ruth Wills, Lays of Lowly Life (1862)
Louisa A. Horsfield, The Cottage Lyre: Being Miscellaneous Poetry (1862)
John Askham, Sonnets on the Months: and other Poems (1863)
Joseph Ramsbottom, Phases of Distress: Lancashire Rhymes (1864)
Edward Capern, Wayside Warbles (Birmingham, 1870)
Fanny Forrester, 'Strangers in the City', and other poems published in Ben Brierley's Journal (Manchester), 1870-1880
Joseph Burgess, A Potential Poet? His Autobiographical Verse (Ilford, c.1874)
Edwin Waugh, Poems and Lancashire Songs (Manchester, 1876)
John Bedford Leno, The Last Idler, and Other Poems; by John Bedford Leno (London, 1889), The Aftermath; with Autobiography of the Author, John Bedford Leno (London, 1892)
Joseph Skipsey, Songs and Lyrics (London, 1892)
Samuel Laycock, Collected Writings (Oldham, 1900)