| They are there at the periphery of almost every British novel, poem, and short story written during the nineteenth century, and without them, the author's work would be without a modicum of verisimilitude. They work in the factories, educate the children, sweep the chimneys, staff the homes of the aristocracy, and pick pockets. They are the working classes, and their stories are told by Austen, Dickens, the Brownings, and the Brontes, and less recognizable literati such as Frances Trollope, Caroline Norton, Arthur Morrison and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna as well. But perhaps most importantly, they told their own stories, and in doing so they left hundreds of autobiographical accounts of the everyday lives of working men, women, and children in nineteenth-century Britain, which informed and were informed by the literature of middle-class writers throughout the century.;In this dissertation, I examine autobiographical accounts by factory children, governesses, pickpockets, cheap jacks, ratcatchers, gypsies, carnies, domestic servants, teachers, chimney sweeps and others, and in conjunction I examine the literature of middle-class writers that depicted individuals in these occupations. In addition to its usefulness as a comparative study and an examination of the nineteenth-century autobiographical genre, this is also important as an influence study, in the sense that working-class lifewriting reacted to and utilized the characters that middle-class writers created for their readers. The result is a dissertation that is useful to the student of literature and the historian alike. |
