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

报纸诗歌专栏、工人期刊、当地图书馆和阅览室的现存记录以及社会记录显示，产业工人将大量的工作时间和短暂的闲暇时间用于写作、阅读和讨论文学作品。在这一时期，每个工业场所都有自己的作家。大多数人都有不止一个名字，比如诗人和记者“Nisbet Noble”（詹姆斯·弗格森）和“Will Harrow”（约翰·斯坦利）在珀斯郡的斯坦利·米尔斯，或者自传作家和诗人“Rustic Rhymer”（托马斯·斯图尔特）和“David Wingate”（大卫·温盖特）在拉纳克郡的同一个矿井。“活塞，笔和出版社”恢复了从19世纪40年代到第一次世界大战期间这些产业工人从事文学文化的被遗忘的方式。通过关注矿工、铁路工人和纺织厂工人，它将调查职业、地点和作为特定劳动力社区一部分的感知如何影响工人作为作者、表演者和读者的活动。我们的重点是苏格兰和英格兰北部，英国两个维多利亚时代最大的工业城市曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥是兴趣中心。我们将通过档案研究和报纸期刊数据库的范围研究，揭示这些行业工人的诗歌，歌曲，期刊和报纸文章以及其他散文作品（包括自传和传记）。此外，我们还将研究19世纪图书馆和阅览室的保存记录，通过借阅者的记录来追溯阅读的历史，并研究与特定工作场所或在其附近运营的“文学”协会的记录（记录簿、会员名录、手稿杂志）。之前没有一个项目或出版的作品试图从专业和地点的角度来反映漫长的维多利亚时期的工人阶级文学文化。此外，现有的研究和选集并没有提供我们对阅读史、协会文化史和工人作品的文学分析的跨学科关注。虽然最近关于英国工业革命的历史研究已经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主要是由观察者或雇主的叙述所主导，而不是工人自己如何表现他们的劳动，以及如何将自己表现为一个有文化的劳动力，并在成熟的和流行的文学中投资。尽管人们对工人阶级的阅读越来越感兴趣，但许多工人文化投资和文化素养的证据仍然分散在地方和地区档案中。关于维多利亚时代的工人（如上面列出的那些人）写了什么、读了什么、唱了什么，以及他们是如何接触文学作品的，我们目前所知道的或假设的，只是我们通过深入的档案研究和仔细的对比分析所能知道的一小部分。虽然这个项目的学术成果将对工人阶级文化、历史和文学的研究以及我们对维多利亚时代工业主义的学术看法做出重大贡献，但我们也试图让公众意识到这一被忽视的工业遗产方面。在现有联系的基础上，我们将与选定的博物馆和国家及地方的非学术合作伙伴合作，探讨如何将这一重要的非物质遗产纳入其收藏和推广活动。在这样做的过程中，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。通过我们与总工会和潜在的其他工会的联系，“活塞，钢笔和出版社”也将结合对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.