Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2012
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2 The most important works include Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Ashraf, Mary, Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1978–79)Google Scholar; Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981)Google Scholar, and Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Maidment, Brian, “Essayists and Artizans—the Making of Victorian Self-Taught Poets,” Literature and History 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 74–91Google Scholar, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1987)Google Scholar, and “Class and Cultural Production in the Industrial City,” in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, ed. Kidd, A. J. and Roberts, K. W., (Manchester, 1985), 148–66Google Scholar; Klaus, H. G., The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton, 1985)Google Scholar.
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4 In The Victorian Working-Class Writer (London, 1999), 91, 114–15Google Scholar, Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts point out that a few other working-class individuals, including J. B. Leno and Ben Brierley, managed to make a decent living from literature.
5 Curiously, there is no mention of Frost in either the multivolume Dictionary of Labour Biography or the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but there are some fascinating leads in Thompson, Dorothy, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), 221, 232Google Scholar.
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7 Frost, Thomas, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities (1876; London, 1881), 171–72Google Scholar.
8 Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (London, 1990), 155Google Scholar.
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15 For this milieu see McCalman, Radical Underworld; Sigel, Lisa, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 15–49Google Scholar. Frost asserted that only upper-class patrons bought expensive pornographic texts in Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (London, 1886), 53–54Google Scholar, though Lynda Nead argues for a wider influence in Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT, 2000), 180–84Google Scholar.
16 Technological changes were almost totally confined to London before mid-century as Musson, A. E. notes in The Typographical Association: Origins and History Up to 1949 (Oxford, 1954), 16Google Scholar. For firsthand accounts of deteriorating social relations in the printing trade see Smith, Charles Manby, The Working Man's Way in the World: Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer (1857; London, 1967), 16–22Google Scholar; Adams, W. E., Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903; New York, 1968), 339, 377Google Scholar. The classic study of the tramping system remains Hobsbawm, E. J., “The Tramping Artisan,” in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), 34–63Google Scholar.
17 Frost rejected Barmby's mix of pantheism and Christian theology and tried, briefly, to run an alternative title called the Communist Journal. Barmby reacted vindictively and wrote to Holyoake warning him to have nothing to do with such an untrustworthy character. Barmby to Holyoake, n.d., letter 338, Holyoake Collection, Co-operative Union Library, Manchester.
18 Frost, Recollections, 88–89. Among his grandmother's books (which Frost later inherited) were bound copies of the Spectator, Guardian, Adventurer, and Persian Letters, as well as an edition of the letters of the second Lord Lyttelton.
19 Frost, Thomas, Emma Mayfield: or, the Rector's Daughter (London, 1848), 147Google Scholar.
20 Frost, Reminiscences, 75.
21 Note that G. J. Holyoake also represented the workshop as a kind of prison in his autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life (1892; London 1906), 1:20.
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24 The phrase is from New Grub Street (1891; London, 1985), 46Google Scholar.
25 Frost, Thomas, Croydon and the North Down: A Handy Guide to Rambles in the District (London, 1881), 54Google Scholar.
26 Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, 397–98; Ashton, Owen, W. E. Adams: Chartist, Radical and Journalist, 1832–1906 (Tyne and Wear, 1991)Google Scholar. There is a damning portrait of the hack writer in Smith, The Working Man's Way in the World, 209–16.
27 Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews with Michael Foucault (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 113–38Google Scholar. See also Rose, Mark, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 51–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books (London, 1994), 29–32Google Scholar.
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29 Frost, Recollections, 87–88. Note that Jasper Milvain in Gissing's New Grub Street (62) also recognized the importance of tact. Bowlby, Rachel's Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, 1985)Google Scholar discusses Gissing within the context of the commodification of literature.
30 Frost did, however, occasionally credit a number of outstanding contemporaries with genius, notably Charles Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. See Recollections, 320.
31 Ibid., 90.
32 Ibid., 188.
33 Ibid., 243–44.
34 Ibid., 247.
35 Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, 393.
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38 Frost, Reminiscences, 330.
39 Cross, The Common Writer, 63.
40 Royal Literary Fund Archive, file no. 2260, reel 90. Frost received grants of between £30 and £50 on each application, £420 in total.
41 Frost, Reminiscences, v.
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43 Ibid., 106.
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46 Frost, Recollections, 33.
47 The serial ran in the Barnsley Times between 15 April and 29 July 1882. Frost leaned heavily on John Hugh Burland's unpublished Annals of Barnsley, parts of which had appeared over the preceding decade in the local Liberal paper, the Barnsley Chronicle. He also corresponded with (and probably met) the aging Burland, who like Vallance had been a leader of local Chartism in its early phase.
48 This work was first published as a penny serial by Purkess. Frost's name appeared on the title page of the bound edition (probably the first time he had seen his name in print), and he thanked readers for their “most flattering” reception of the novel in the preface.
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69 Frost, Recollections, 333–34.
70 Barnsley Times, 18 February 1882, 5.
71 Barnsley Times, 6 May 1882, 5, 10 June 1882, 5, 24 June 1882, 5.
72 Barnsley Times, 3 June 1882, 5.
73 On discursive constraints note also Epstein, Radical Expression, vii.
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75 One might also compare him to displaced “middle-class” writers and politicians like Henry Mayhew and Ernest Jones. Interestingly, Frost was employed to finish Jones's novel, The Lass and the Lady (1855), when the latter ran out of steam. Taylor, Miles's study, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, considers the literariness of Jones's political self.
76 Holyoake used his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1842 as a springboard for his career as a radical speaker and writer. See Grugel, Lee, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia, 1976), 26–28Google Scholar.
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78 Including John Bright, William Gladstone, and Herbert Spencer. See letters 2291, 2305, 2317, 2329, 2334, 2340, 2397, and 3092 in the Holyoake Collection.
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88 Ibid., 114.
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94 Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier's Tale, 104–6.
95 Frost, Reminiscences, 164–65.
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98 All three sometimes wrote different things for different audiences or markets. Alternative readings of Holyoake, for example, can be found in Tholfsen, Trygve, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976), 264Google Scholar; Joyce, Visions of the People, 52; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 141, 380; Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 114–25. Brierley's continuing radicalism is stressed by Taylor, Anthony, “Reynolds Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy and the Radical Anti-Jubilee: Britain's Anti-Monarchist Tradition Reconsidered,” Historical Research 68, 167 (October 1995): 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 103.
99 Frost, Circus Life, 173.