Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace from the Factory Acts to the First World War

正如报纸上的诗歌专栏、工人期刊、当地图书馆和阅览室的遗志以及社会账目所显示的那样，产业工人将大量的工作生活和短暂的闲暇时间花在了写作、阅读和讨论文学作品上。在这一时期，每个工业工作场所都有自己的作家。大多数人都有不止一个这样的人，比如珀斯郡斯坦利米尔斯的诗人兼记者尼斯贝特·诺布尔(James Ferguson)和威尔·哈罗(Will Harrow)，或者拉纳克郡同一座矿山的自传作家兼诗人鲁斯蒂克·里默(Rustic Rhymer)(托马斯·斯图尔特Thomas Stewart)和大卫·温盖特(David Wingate)。《活塞、笔和新闻》重现了这些产业工人从19世纪40年代到第一次世界大战期间与文学文化接触的被遗忘的方式。通过关注矿工、铁路工人和纺织厂工人，它将调查职业、地理位置和作为特定劳动力社区的一部分的看法如何影响工人作为作者、表演者和读者的活动。我们的注意力集中在苏格兰和英格兰北部，英国两个最大的维多利亚时代工业城市曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥是人们感兴趣的中心。我们将利用档案研究和报刊数据库的范围研究，发现这些行业从业人员的诗歌、歌曲、期刊和报纸写作以及其他散文写作(包括自传和传记)。此外，我们还将利用保存下来的19世纪图书馆和阅览室的记录，通过借阅者的记录追溯阅读历史，并研究与特定工作场所或在其附近活动的“文学”协会(会议记录、会员名录、手稿杂志)的记录。之前没有任何项目或出版的作品试图从职业和地点两个方面反映漫长的维多利亚时期的工人阶级文学文化。此外，现有的研究和选集没有提供我们对阅读历史、联想文化史和工人作品的文学分析的跨学科关注。尽管最近关于英国工业革命的历史研究已转向更多地考虑工人的作品，但对维多利亚时代工业的文学表现的研究仍然由观察家或雇主的描述主导，而不是工人本身如何代表他们的劳动，并将自己描绘成一群有文化的劳动力，投资于知名文学和通俗文学。尽管人们对工人阶级阅读的兴趣与日俱增，但许多工人文化投资和文化素养的证据仍然散布在当地和地区的档案中。我们目前所知道或假设的关于维多利亚时代的工人(如上面列出的那些人)写、读或唱的内容，以及他们如何获取文学作品，只是我们通过深入的档案研究和对发现的仔细和比较分析所知道的一小部分。虽然这个项目的学术成果将对工人阶级文化、历史和文学的研究做出重大贡献，并有助于我们对维多利亚时代工业主义的学术认知，但我们也试图创造公众对工业遗产这一被忽视的方面的认识。在现有联系的基础上发展新的联系，我们将与选定的博物馆和国家和地方的非学术合作伙伴合作，研究如何将这一重要的非物质遗产纳入他们的收藏和外联活动。通过这样做，我们希望促进苏格兰和英格兰北部遗产部门的机构和个人之间关于文学文化在英国工业历史中的地位和意义的富有成效的讨论。通过我们与工会总联合会以及可能还有其他工会的联系，《活塞、笔和新闻》还将纳入对21世纪工作场所和历史工作场所文化的反思。

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.