A History of British Working Class Literature, edited by Laboring-Class Poets Online's own John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, will be published next month (30 April, 2017) by Cambridge University Press.
One of the defining features of the Labouring-Class Poet tradition is the sense of community shared between these poets. Because they were so conscious of their sense of ‘place’, both in society and geographically, common bonds formed between those from similar areas. One of the first things the LCPO Database makes apparent is these specific links: it helps scholars to group the poets from Paisley together, those from Bristol, those from Tyneside.
Today marks the inaugural post in what we plan to make a regular item: the featured poet. This week, I’ll actually discuss a pair of poets: George Linnaeus Banks and Isabella Varley Banks.
When we talk of someone dying too young, or dying before his/her time, what do we mean?
One interesting category of distinction highlighted in the Database of Laboring-Class Poets and illuminated on the new Omeka site [deprecated] through the use of tags is “tragic youth.” As we complete our data entry, we have the chance to reevaluate our use of terms like “tragic youth,” which can be problematic for a number of reasons.
One of the more interesting obstacles the team has faced so far in the process of transitioning to Omeka is settling on a controlled vocabulary for occupations. Early on, we decided to establish such a list as a separate field from occupations, which would allow us to narrow the range of terms describing poets’ jobs and thus make tagging and searching simpler. For example, all poets who did any kind of weaving would be called, simply, “weavers,” rather than defining them more specifically (e.g. handloom weaver, powerloom weaver).