Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800. 3 vols. Gen. eds. John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi. Vol. 1. 1780-1800. Ed. Tim Burke. Vol. 2. 1700-1740. Ed. William Christmas. Vol. 3. 1740-1780. Ed. Bridget Keegan. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. ISBN 1851967583. Price: US$420.

In recent years Pickering and Chatto has done much to expand the range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. By publishing new scholarly editions of canonical figures, facsimiles of primary texts, and out-of-print or unpublished works, the press has played an important role in the reevaluation of the period. Eigtheenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800 extends that mission by providing literary scholars, students, and general readers a selection of canonical poets within the context of unknown or little-known poets from the same class background. In presenting labouring-class writers as a group, they appear in a fresh light—not as footnotes in literary history, but as a complex counter-tradition. The canonical writers represented—Duck, Chatterton and Yearsley, for example—take on new cultural meanings placed in the company of their peers and followers. All of the writers in these splendid volumes struggled with imposed definitions and assumptions, ranging from the vogue for “peasant poets” in the eighteenth century to Southey’s designation of them as “uneducated poets” in his seminal anthology of 1831. The editors have settled on “labouring-class poets” as the most purely descriptive, and thus least intrusive, designation. The term “self-taught poet” evokes an image of a series of isolated autodidacts, a false impression that these volumes debunks more thoroughly than any critical argument ever could. The care that the general editors, John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi, have taken in choosing the title of the volumes is indicative of their determination to make the set as historically accurate as possible. The close collaboration between the general editors and the volume editors fully elaborates the complex subject of eighteenth-century labouring-class literary production while providing enough individual editorial autonomy to account for specific differences over the course of the century. These volumes provide the essential literary documents and commentary necessary for a thorough study of the various forms of patronage throughout the period, and represent the most important new source text for the study of eighteenth-century print culture in many years. For example, the generous selection of the work of Ned Ward shows the scope and variety of his literary ambition, ranging from political and social satire to his appropriation of Dante in his A Journey to Hell. This scope represents an important correction because Ward’s literary celebrity is too often based on his inclusion in Pope’s Dunciad, and “among the frogs” in Peri Bathous (1: xxiv, n.4). The fact that Ward was a professional writer interested in reaching a mass audience, completely outside any system of patronage, caused considerable anxiety for Pope, who denigrated Ward and other independent authors as the “Grubstreet hacks” (1: xvii). Freeing these writers from Pope’s influential views allows us to better gauge their cultural significance. Ward self-consciously wrote for various emerging readerships. He wrote A Trip to Jamaica to meet the demand for travel narratives, and as William Christmas, the editor of the volume one, suggests, he produced The London Spy as a “satiric monthly aimed at the coffee-house crowd” (1: xviii). Selections from these various literary modes reveal Ward as an important literary figure, engaged with Pope in a struggle to define authorship and establish and shape the public taste. Pope also dominated the reception of the other key figure in the first half of the century, Stephen Duck. Christmas has provided an excellent selection of Duck’s poetry from throughout his career rather than providing the usual selections from The Thresher’s Labour. Even more than Ward, Duck has sometimes been reduced to a Pope footnote in eighteenth-century studies, and by including the visionary poem on the death of Queen Caroline (1837) and the later poem Every Man …