In 1868, Alexander Wallace paused in his introduction to the life and works of Janet Hamilton, a respected Scottish working-class poet, to note his subject's interest in literary parlour games: “Janet asked us if we had ever tried the writing of Cento verses, which she characterized as a pleasant literary amusement for a meeting of young friends in a winter's night.”

He then cites in full an example she offered:

Placed immediately after a preface by the leading Scottish critic George Gilfillan, which situates Hamilton firmly as a poet of her native scenery, humble and self-educated, this “Cento” sonnet seems to mark an odd disjunction between this persona, created by these middle-class male commentators, and the words of the poet herself. At the time of publication of this volume, Hamilton was aged seventy-three and almost blind. Living in Langloan, by this date part of a heavily industrialized suburb of Glasgow, Hamilton was married at thirteen and had ten children, learning to write only in her fifties. The two-room crofter's cottage in which she and her elderly husband lived and worked might not seem an immediately obvious location for “pleasant literary amusements.” Notable nineteenth-century examples of this kind of literary game come from families like the Rossettis, as Christina and her brothers composed bouts-rimés sonnets based on a set of given words, or from a cultured middle-class Anglican circle of friends, such as that centred on the Kebles and the Yonges in Hursley, where “the nonsense-poetical games of those merry evenings” reflected and fostered the literary achievements of the guests.Footnote ¹ When Alexander Smith, also a working-class Glasgow poet, described a poetical game in which the participants invent a series of similes, ranging from the tragic to the comic, in his “spasmodic” epic A Life-Drama, he set it in the “manor” of an English country gentleman (139). Such groups are clearly separated from Hamilton's world (and that of Smith) by class, education, and geography.

This Cento sonnet undoes the careful work of Gilfillan and Wallace and their confident pronouncement that “the lower classes have less disguise” (Hamilton, Poems and Ballads xiv) in their poetry by displaying not only Hamilton's extensive knowledge of English poems of the previous century, but her ability to cut and paste their lines to create a new literary form. It is both intriguing and disturbing because it implicitly raises a key issue associated with nineteenth-century working-class poetry, the issue of the status of poetry that might seem wholly derivative of the language and form of “high” poetic discourse, to the extent that it becomes what Fredric Jameson has described as “blank parody” or pastiche, “a neutral practice . . . without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse” (17). Middle-class patrons such as Gilfillan display considerable anxiety about this issue in their defensive assertions that the working-class poets they are championing are self-taught and thus natural: on Hamilton, for instance, Gilfillan claims that despite evidence of her wide reading in local libraries and periodicals, her poetry is unmediated:

In order for this to hold true, however, he implicitly has to ignore a number of Hamilton's poems. Just as Smith's self-conscious inclusion of a game involving the artificial construction of a series of similes – in a poem which itself relied heavily on long series of similes – highlights the artificial construction of A Life-Drama, so Hamilton's Cento sonnet and many of the other poems in her collections draw attention to the literariness of her writing.

Moreover, although the sonnet may appear to be mere light entertainment, the lines selected do not simply showcase the extent of Hamilton's reading; they also offer a tentative commentary on issues central to the working-class poet and hence introduce elements of subversive parody. Thomas Gray's famous line from “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was frequently used and adapted by labouring-class poets in the early nineteenth century to comment on their relation to the canon, as Mina Gorji has recently demonstrated.Footnote ² The lines from “The Hermit,” by Irish poet Thomas Parnell, and on the village preacher, from Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village,” also come from poems which celebrate hidden and unsung heroes and discuss the virtues and pains of remaining withdrawn from the main current of social life. The inclusion of Thomas Campbell and Allan Cunningham shows Hamilton's knowledge of her Scottish forebears: Cunningham was born in Dumfriesshire and had family connections with Burns, and Campbell was a Glasgow poet known for his long poem Gertrude of Wyoming (1809). Most interestingly, what appear to be two simple lines on nature from Cowper and Byron look rather different when placed in context. Cowper's “Beneath a vault unsullied by a cloud” occurs in Book V of The Task (line 824), immediately after his impassioned meditation on kingship, slavery, and the meanings of liberty. “Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue” is actually Byron citing a line from Southey (the phrase appears in quotation marks in Don Juan IV: 878) and applying it to his satirical description of bluestocking women readers and writers. Re-quoting Byron's quotation functions as a sophisticated in-joke, particularly since Hamilton herself could be considered a “bluestocking,” an intellectual woman. This patchwork, humorous sonnet effectively constructs an alternative canon of Scottish and Irish poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and suggests a high valuation for those who (like Hamilton) had radical political sympathies and practised their craft outside the main stream of contemporary culture. Here, as elsewhere, Hamilton is shrewdly playing with the reader – or, we might think, with the somewhat patronizing Alexander Wallace.

Victorian working-class poetry has rapidly become an important subject for late twentieth and twenty-first century criticism, and the poems of Hamilton and the other writers discussed here – particularly Alexander Anderson and Gerald Massey – have now been anthologized and are beginning to encroach on the established “canon” of Victorian poetry. Yet critics and editors continue to shy away from extensive discussion of working-class poets and poems that consciously highlight their relation to (and reliance upon) the literary establishment. Martha Vicinus, in her foundational study, suggests that such “Parnassian” poets “offered . . . a borrowed culture that aped the morals and sentiments of those holding social and political power” (168), a comment with evident negative associations. Brian Maidment's important discussion of Parnassian poetry in his 1987 anthology is more generous, sympathizing with the poets’ desires “to step beyond the cultural constraints of working-class life into a more ambitious, even universal and trans-historical, poetic discourse” (97) and arguing that the “intelligent self-consciousness” of these poems should not be underestimated (99). His comment that the relation of Victorian working-class poets to the dominant poetic tradition, represented by poets such as Tennyson, has been “almost totally unexplored,” however, remains largely true. If we take Hamilton as an example, twentieth and twenty-first century critics and editors have concentrated almost exclusively on those poems, largely written in Scottish dialect, which deal with politics and local affairs. Valentine Cunningham introduced three of Hamilton's poems into Blackwell's The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics: one on women's role in society; one on the Crimean war; and “Our Local Scenery,” a satirical dialect poem advocating temperance (41–42). Catherine Kerrigan's anthology of Scottish women poets includes “Oor Location,” a tragicomic poem on the industrial changes Hamilton experienced in her local village; a poem on labour, “The Lay of the Tambour Frame”; and another of Hamilton's numerous temperance poems, “The Plague of Our Isle.” Valentina Bold, in A History of Scottish Women's Writing, focuses on “Oor Location” and “A Plea for the Doric,” Hamilton's defence of dialect. William Findlay's discussion of Hamilton in A History of Scottish Literature argues for her status as a local poet and hence deploys “Oor Location” and “Rhymes for the Times,” an explicitly political dialect poem. Maidment includes only “Rhymes for the Times” in The Poorhouse Fugitives, although he does also comment on Hamilton's conservative prose (187–88). Florence Boos, the leading expert on Scottish working-class women's writing, who has published extensively on Hamilton, again concentrates on “Oor Location,” “Rhymes for the Times,” and similar works, valuing these poems primarily for their “political satire, social criticism, and interpretive vignettes of daily life” (“Cauld” 55). Most recently, the outstanding three-volume anthology from Pickering & Chatto, Nineteenth-Century Labouring Class Poets, edited by Kaye Kossick, devotes twenty pages to Hamilton and includes all the poems mentioned above plus another temperance poem, two political poems (on the Crimea and on Italy), two on industrial change (“Luggie, Past and Present” and “The Sunday Rail”), and two that deal in different ways with women's role in society. All these aspects of Hamilton's work are of course vital, and her importance as a poet deeply engaged with local and international politics should not be understated. But concentrating on her as a radical Scottish poet overlooks her engagement with British literary culture in a wider sense and evades the fact that a substantial number of her published poems deal with “Parnassian” themes of nature, childhood, nostalgia, and the role of the poet and involve significant allusion to the literary establishment. As Mike Sanders has recently pointed out in his work on the Northern Star and Chartist poetry, the critical tendency to focus on “poetry of an obvious and immediate political nature” ignores at least a quarter of the poems (largely featuring Parnassian themes and language) actually published and discussed in this leading working-class newspaper (48). Excising such poetry, whether in Hamilton or others, from the working-class canon removes a sense of the complexity of working-class poetic identity and also ignores some of the intriguing ambiguities created by poems which hint at the “cento” form in the extent of their reliance on previous models.

By examining a small selection of representative poems, I want to suggest that the concept of “hybridity” might be useful in exploring works that blend the voice of a working-class author with more established voices, whether through allusion, quotation, parody, or a less definable sense of linguistic and formal influence. Hamilton's sonnet, indeed, could stand as the purest form of a “hybrid” poem, as it grafts together disparate sentences to create, at first glance, something new but effectively unnatural. In relation to the Victorian working-class writer, hybridity has just begun to enter critical discourse: as Boos notes in a recent article, we need to develop “broader interpretive schemata” in order to deal with the “hybrid forms of poetic expression” found in such poems (Boos, “Nurs'd” 138). Hybridity as a term has, of course, gained greatest currency in post-colonial theory, where the colonial subject frequently has been described as hybrid, caught between and composed of two cultures (Ashcroft 118–21). Post-colonial theorists, most notably Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, have suggested that hybridity can enable “a form of subversion . . . that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (Bhabha 154), although the extent to which an appropriation of dominant cultural norms is subversive rather than conservative remains in question, as does the value of “hybridity” as a metaphor for this process.Footnote ³ Robert Young argues that linguistic hybridity should be read through Bakhtin's classic essay on “Discourse in the Novel,” in which Bakhtin asks:

“Hybridisation” is for Bakhtin a form of heteroglossia, a blending of different voices. He determinedly views this heteroglossia as a characteristic of novels rather than poetry (with an important exception for “low” poetic genres) and locates these hybrid qualities in the mid-nineteenth century – as Young notes, the point at which the term “hybrid” first gained currency in scientific and racial theory – by using Dickens's prose as his leading example (Bakhtin 287, 301–08). As I suggest here, working-class poetry of the mid-Victorian period might profitably be read in Bakhtin's terms. Just as Dickens is constantly alert to the “social languages” of his time and their relation to “literary language,” so these poets exploit a doubled “linguistic consciousness” created by writing in a literary language from a lower-class perspective. While several of the poets examined in this article are Scottish and thus could be read as colonial writers, the particular forms of hybridity traced here are less dependent on nationality than on class. Scottish identity may strengthen a sceptical attitude towards a largely English literary establishment, but the strategies I discuss are equally apparent in writers identified as English.Footnote ⁴ Working-class poems are hybrid, both in terms of form and content, as they negotiate two traditions and respond to the development of both a working-class and a higher-class literary canon. Rather than seeing this hybridity as “aping” a “borrowed culture,” I suggest that the self-consciousness of poems by Hamilton, Smith, Anderson, Massey, and others points towards an intelligent if fraught negotiation with the literary establishment. They do not set out to be subversive (though their poems arguably create subversive effects), given that many of the appropriations or borrowings discussed here are clearly inspired by admiration for more established writers. But these borrowings nonetheless allow such poets to highlight their ambiguous position or “hybrid” status as working-class writers, particularly since their poems call into question the Romantic assumption that the poet “sings alone” in the sense of possessing a distinctive and original voice.

The poets discussed here largely wrote after mid-century, when, as critics have noted, a belief in poetry as a form of social protest and political comment (particularly evident in Chartist verse) gave way to a concept of poetry as ennobling and soothing, designed to give aesthetic pleasure and offering a measure of escapism from the harshness of everyday life (Janowitz 152, passim; Murphy 133). As John Young, a working-class Glasgow poet (and a close friend of Hamilton) who published his first poems under the title Lays from the Poorhouse, puts it:

Young's poem is explicitly about reading Longfellow's highly popular “A Psalm of Life,” and it is notable that he borrows Longfellow's stirring four-beat trochaic rhythm, so that his poem echoes or embodies the kind of effect created by its original. Such poems work to emphasize the dichotomy between the poet's location and economic situation – in the poor-house, in a garret, in the heart of an industrialized city – and his or her sophisticated engagement with texts as a reader and writer. It is also worth noting that, using Ann Janowitz's terms from Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Young's poem encapsulates a move away from an earlier, Chartist view of poetry as a collective form, embodying “communitarian lyricism” and a shared voice, to poetry as individualist and personal: “A Voice from the Poorhouse” (13). In a later poem, “A Catalogue of Poets,” Young further describes his reading interests, moving from local Glaswegian and Scottish poets (including Hamilton), to Shakespeare, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Cowper, Byron, Bryant, Poe, and Longfellow, concluding with a plea that the reader buy him any poets missing from the list. Many, if not most, published collections of verse by a working-class poet from this period contain at least one similar poem on the author's reading habits. James Macfarlan, for instance, another less-known Scottish poet, lists the enjoyment he has found in reading Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, Cervantes, Camoens, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and the classics in “Bookworld” – all of which, according to memoirs, he borrowed from local libraries while leading a pedlar's life in the environs of Edinburgh and Glasgow (99–101). In a better-known example, John C. Prince, a Manchester artisan and leading working-class poet of the 1840s, wrote in “A Farewell to Poetry”:

The first stanza aligns Prince with poetic tradition even as he refutes it. His invocation of a “needy throng” seems to refer back to these poets, as though they too demanded praise and fame, but also suggests the group of working-class poets with whom Prince associated in Manchester. He is both part of and separate from this “throng.” The last lines emphasize the difficulty Prince, like most working-class poets, experienced in making a living from his poetry, but the question mark leaves open whether he will actually give it up. In stating his credentials under pretence of abandoning them, this poem, like Young's “A Catalogue of Poets,” serves as a plea for patronage.

Macfarlan and Prince simply present their reading habits in the form of a list, but other writers, like Young, stress their intense engagement with a particular poet or poem. Interestingly, for the writers examined here, the radical credentials of the poets they read seem less important than formerly. As Paul Murphy and Vicinus have examined, working-class critics and authors in the early nineteenth century tended to admire and emulate poets who held appropriately radical political views, like Shelley, Byron, and Burns (Murphy, passim; Vicinus 96). It was only from the mid-century onwards that poetic value and political sympathy came to be increasingly divorced, so that writers such as Wordsworth and Tennyson, both from relatively privileged backgrounds, both Poet Laureate and both increasingly conservative in their later years, came to the forefront.Footnote ⁵ Working-class poets of the post-Chartist generation admire and emulate these writers while using the appropriation of their language and forms to grapple with their high status.

One instance comes from Alexander Anderson, or “Surfaceman,” a railway worker and another protégé of Gilfillan, who achieved brief fame with the publication of Songs of the Rail in Reference Anderson1878. Anderson's Ballads and Sonnets (Reference Anderson1879) opens with the poet standing at Wordsworth's grave and offering his verse as a dedication, and from this point on it is infused with the language and form of Wordsworth's best-known poems. “Summer Invocation,” for instance, includes these lines:

This recalls “The Tables Turned” from Lyrical Ballads:

Anderson's poem supports Wordsworth's exhortation to “let Nature be your teacher” (l.16), though the substitution of “mind” for “heart” might suggest an intellectual engagement with nature rather than an affective one. “The poet's mood,” in Anderson's poem, is ambiguous because of the Wordsworthian allusion: will the speaker feel himself to be a poet once he has escaped from civilization, or will he feel himself “rising” to the level of the poet, Wordsworth? Where Wordsworth's speaker in “The Tables Turned” addresses a friend, the speaker of Anderson's opening invocation is not the poet but a “voice” calling the poet forth, a voice that apparently incorporates Wordsworth's own poetic voice; thus Anderson's connection from the start is not to another person but to another poem. “Summer Invocation,” therefore, acts as a reflection of the conscious irony of Wordsworth's poem, in that Anderson's desire for unmediated contact with Nature is inevitably shaped by reading. Even when alone with nature, “Voices and many sounds invade” his thoughts, like “a song/Dear lips have sung in other years” (152–53). The characteristic emphasis on invasion, an irresistible and desirable influence, is evident throughout Anderson's allusive poetry. Elsewhere in the same volume, he explicitly figures his relation to an unidentified poet, whose words he has been reading, as possession:

Harold Bloom's remark that “Poetic influence, in its first phase, is not to be distinguished from love” (12) seems curiously pertinent to “He Came From a Land,” as do Robert Young's remarks on nineteenth-century colonial literature as “driven by desire for the cultural other” (3). The almost sexual merging of these two figures provides a model for hybridity: their “beings” are blended so that, implicitly, Anderson's poem adopts the music of this ghostly poet. “Cannot but let,” like “invade,” suggests a model of influence as unwilled but pleasurable surrender. There are hints of the “revisionary strife” Bloom sees as inherent in influence in such phrases (12), yet there is also a sense in which Anderson stages a deliberate submission to other poets, highlighting his own inability (and lack of desire) to sing alone.

Anderson's primary poetic influence, besides Wordsworth, is Tennyson, whose language echoes through Songs of the Rail. But Tennyson's effect on working-class poetry of the mid-nineteenth century is perhaps best exemplified in the poetry and prose of Gerald Massey.Footnote ⁶ Massey was one of the better-known working-class poets and one of few who managed to earn enough to support himself as an independent author. His working-class credentials were impeccable. Born into poverty in rural southern England, he worked in a silk-mill as a child and then as an errand-boy in London. Through his association with various radical causes, particularly Chartism, he rose to become a regular contributor to and editor for the radical press, running journals like the short-lived Spirit of Freedom, and through his links to Christian Socialism he came to know writers like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. While he is celebrated and anthologized today primarily for his powerful, blood-and-thunder poems in support of Chartism and radicalism, much of his verse deals with familiar themes of love, marriage, and Nature, and channels the language and style of canonized nineteenth-century poets to unsettling effect. There is something both defiant and playful about the way he deploys the currency of high poetic culture, especially in relation to Tennyson's influence. For example, in what appears to be the best-known of his poems, “The Ballad of Babe Christabel,” a sentimental tale of a beautiful doomed child, he observes:

Besides taking the child's name from Coleridge, this verse conflates two lines of “Kubla Khan” (“For he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise” [53–54]), changing the objects but maintaining the rhythmic pattern of these lines, and it also borrows from In Memoriam in its stanza form and linguistic echoes. Interestingly, Massey altered the last two lines of this stanza when republishing it in My Lyrical Life, perhaps suggesting anxiety that it was sliding into unintentional parody. The Tennyson allusions do, however, serve a clear purpose in signalling to the reader that what appears to be a ballad is actually an elegy, because Babe Christabel is fated to die. In relation to Coleridge, the comparison to the mystical and powerful poet/seer in “Kubla Khan” might suggest Christabel's otherworldliness, her poetic nature; more importantly, it serves to emphasize that the ballad form is simultaneously a reference to an oral poetry tradition and to Romantic ballads as practiced by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Massey's poem is uneasily located somewhere between the two.

One of Massey's most notable unsignalled borrowings comes in an extraordinary dramatic monologue on “Protoplasm,” spoken by “A Physicist” (My Lyrical Life 86–91). The speaker relates his problems in uniting a scientific, materialistic concept of life and matter with a spiritual sense that life is provided by God. Mid-way through the poem, he describes how he is pursued by spiritual doubt despite his constant attempts to find an unassailable scientific position:

This anecdote about an irrepressible ghost was a common folk story, but Massey, with his inveterate reading of and immense admiration for Tennyson, would hardly have been unaware that it also appears in Tennyson's “Walking to the Mail,” one of the “English Idylls” published in 1842.Footnote ⁷ The story there is related by one of two speakers, James, a “Tory to the quick,” and he applies it to a tenant farmer “haunted with a jolly ghost”:

Massey's poem is thus haunted by a poem containing a story about a haunting. As in many of his allusions, there is a potential political context here which sits oddly with the subject matter and dramatic monologue form of the poem into which it is incorporated. “Walking to the Mail” deals explicitly with Chartist disturbances. James and John, as they walk together, discuss how a local aristocrat, Sir Edward, was induced to flee England because of his fear lest “his nice eyes/ Should see the raw mechanic's bloody thumbs/ Sweat on his blazon'd chairs” (74–76). The powerful physicality, the rawness of this language as the assonance of “nice eyes” contrasts with the harsh consonantal sounds of “mechanic's bloody thumbs,” dramatically represents Sir Edward's fear of Chartist rebellion, as working-class unrest stains his crested chairs and threatens to turn a blazon into a blaze. Unlike his master, the haunted farmer is trapped in England. But if Tennyson's ghost stands for “the spectral operations of the politically repressed” (Ebbatson 18), then the wider point is not just that it haunts the fears of middle and upper-class Englishmen but that fleeing it is pointless, as this unrest cannot be evaded simply by changing location.

The word “flitting” in both poems is a dialect term associated with poor tenants moving house due to rent arrears or eviction, as in a Scottish saying noted by Billy Kay: “A face to follow a flittin” (129). As a folk story, then, this anecdote implies the inescapability of social circumstances and reflects, as Roger Ebbatson notes, on rural displacements and removals (17). In Massey's poem, this politicized context is absent: it is only the prior usage by Tennyson that brings it into relief. For the fact that Tennyson used this story, and used it in a poem with overt relation to Chartist politics, must surely make us speculate on why a Chartist poet reworks it. Given that “Protoplasm” deals with intellectual haunting, the use of this anecdote might signify Massey's own intellectual debt to Tennyson – as a political poet among other things. It emphasizes, in addition, the fact that Tennyson's own poem is indebted to folk narratives and to dialect. Elaine Jordan observes that the Alexandrian idyll used by Tennyson is itself a self-conscious form which “shows already the anxiety of influence” (36), and Ebbatson notes that the form indicates that the Idylls work through “reappropriation of a founding classical model” (4). Tennyson's poem thus suffers from its own anxiety of influence as well as political anxieties, both thrown into relief by Massey's reuse of this anecdote.

The complexities of such relationships between working-class author and source material are nowhere more apparent than in several of Hamilton's poems. Hamilton was considerably older than the writers discussed above, and her poetic allegiances reflect this. Her literary affiliations are to Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, and the Scottish tradition, including Burns, Ramsay, and Fergusson. As her satiric “Hints to Poets” indicates, she was also somewhat suspicious of the new “spasmodic” generation, influenced by Tennyson, which included Alexander Smith, Massey, and to a lesser extent James Macfarlan (Poems of Purpose 73). But Hamilton did engage with contemporary London literary culture quite particularly on at least two occasions, in the form of poetic dialogues or interactions with material from Charles Dickens's Household Words. For a writer associated very strongly with local newspapers and working-class journals, Hamilton's interest in Household Words, a journal aimed primarily at a middle-class readership, might seem surprising. On the other hand, Household Words and its successor All the Year Round were objects of aspiration to working-class poets attempting to break into periodical publication, both because they paid very well and because of the status associated with Dickens. Prince, William Cox Bennett, and Thomas Miller all had poems accepted by Household Words, and Macfarlan's biographers proudly note the “hearty welcome and liberal recompense” he received for publishing at least two poems in the journal (Macfarlan vi).

Hamilton's first engagement with Household Words is the most significant and comes in the form of a satiric imitation of William Allingham's “The Wayside Well,” a poem that appeared in the first number in March 1850. Titled “A Parody on ‘The Wayside Well,’ An Exquisite Little Poem in Dickens’ Household Words, written for Cassell's Working-Man's Friend,” it immediately makes Hamilton's allegiances clear. She locates herself in a tradition of working-class parodies and indicates her support for an explicitly working-class medium of publication rather than the more upmarket journals.Footnote ⁸ Yet the title also, again, displays her knowledge of a wider literary culture, especially since it shows that she has read the opening number of Household Words. Allingham's poem addresses the eponymous well, celebrating its purity, beauty, and romantic rural location:

Hamilton uses the conceit of the well as Cassell's magazine: like Allingham's well, it supplies all comers with refreshment and pleasure. Her poem begins:

As this passage demonstrates, she sticks closely to the language as well as the form of the original. She turns what she herself describes, in potentially condescending language, as a “little” poem into a poem with direct political implications, celebrating a space designed for working-class readership. Allingham's slightly twee peasant lassie and thirsty drover in “The Wayside Well” are purely literary figures, as opposed to Hamilton's “workman” and “Labour's sons,” the actual readers of Cassell's Working-Man's Friend. “Useful,” in line 3, provides an instructive contrast to Allingham's opening verse, and given the publication contexts, might be a pointed question about both the usefulness or otherwise of the kind of poetry represented by “The Wayside Well,” and the usefulness of Household Words as a journal which desires to publish it. In contrast, the very inclusion of Hamilton's explicitly political parody in John Cassell's publication suggests that it provides a home for a more directed poetics. In this sense, Hamilton's parody could be seen as a criticism of Dickens's role, as an enormously influential editor, in publishing unchallenging sentimental verses on nature rather than poetry with a purpose. But the parody, like Massey's borrowing from Tennyson, might also cause us to revisit our view of the original. Arguably, “The Wayside Well” does contain a partial commentary upon class politics since Allingham's well belongs to rich and poor alike. The third stanza states:

This stanza, cut from later published versions of the same poem, reflects upon Dickens's stated editorial policy in the issue, to “bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together” (“Preliminary” 1) – hence Allingham's “wayside well” potentially could be understood in the way in which Hamilton reworks it, as a model for the journal itself. Allingham's pious closing stanza might also suggest that those who have fewer material goods approach heaven more nearly:

Hamilton's version of this stanza makes explicit the point that “barest” might refer to poverty:

As she celebrates literature aimed at (and written by) the working man and woman, with an echo of Burns and “A man's a man for a'that,” she also demonstrates that Household Words might be read differently from the perspective of a working-class reader.

Hamilton's second take on Household Words is a more straightforward signal of respect for Dickens's pioneering social journalism. Whereas “The Wayside Well” provided a gritty and contemporary take on the poem's title, “Contrasted Scenes from Real Life” responds to Dickens's prose by restating it in poetry, with the dubious effect of partially cancelling out the voices of the destitute women he encountered. “Contrasted Scenes in Real Life” consists of two parts. The first describes the lavish society wedding of Sir Peel and Lady Hay, and ends defiantly by stating that despite the bride's wealth and beauty now, in heaven, “The meanest female of the human race/Shall occupy with thee an equal place”(Poems and Essays 71). This conclusion leads on to the second scene, a poetical rendering of Dickens's description of his encounter with five women outside the poorhouse in “A Nightly Scene in London,” first published in Household Words, 26 January 1856:

Compare this to Dickens's initial description: “Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rags. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form” (Journalism 361). To change “bundles of rags” into “huddled masses” substitutes a literary cliché for a pointedly direct description. Hamilton then moves straight to Dickens's conversation with one of the women. In “A Nightly Scene in London,” he reproduces this as dialogue without commentary:

Dickens's rendering of the woman's speech in its ungrammatical simplicity, and his own direct questions, have a powerful effect, inducing pity and horror precisely because this woman does not perceive her situation in those terms or attempt to plead for sympathy. “Want and pain” are stronger for being left implicit, whereas Hamilton's poem writes them in. Her version of the same dialogue gives this speaker a protest couched in more exalted language:

“She told me she come out of Essex” is expanded into “She from the country came,/ And found no choice of life but want or shame” (72), which neatly writes this unidentified woman into a literary tradition of poems about country girls seduced or forced into prostitution in London. While Hamilton may seek sympathy for this speaker by purifying her grammar and adding a religious overtone, her voice effectively vanishes under a weight of association. This distancing makes the scene, like its accompanying fantasy of an upper-class wedding, seem not quite real. Hamilton has not seen these sights herself, and they are both geographically distanced by the London setting and distanced in literary terms by their inclusion in Household Words. Yet Hamilton's poem is more than a weak imitation of Dickens if we see it as another comment on the function of poetry. Whereas the social commentary in Household Words and other leading periodicals generally took place in prose, and the poetry (with a few notable exceptions) was apolitical, Hamilton shows that poetry can have a social mission and can equally represent want and suffering. Moreover, her rewriting of Dickens might draw the reader's attention to the fact that neither discussion of these women is an unmediated representation of “real life,” since Dickens's article is also a literate and literary presentation of these women's plight, in which the author renders their voices for them.

The poem which reflects upon Hamilton's “hybrid” position most remarkably is “The Skylark – Caged and Free,” the first poem in her 1868 collection, which follows directly from Wallace's description of Hamilton “at her ain fireside,” The poem opens by celebrating the skylark as a model for the poet: “Sweet minstrel of the summer dawn,/ Bard of the sky” (Poems and Ballads 51), immediately situating itself within a Romantic tradition epitomized by Shelley's “To a Skylark.” But after a fourteen-line description of the lark celebrating the glories of nature, Hamilton cancels out this pleasant vision:

In this city street, the singularity of the lark's song is partly lost as it becomes mingled with the sounds and atmosphere of industrial labour. The city is a place where everything blurs together: smoke and gases, the shrieks of different machinery, and implicitly, the voices of the inhabitants. “Cribb'd, confin'd” (Macbeth 3.4.23) serves little purpose as a meaningful allusion other than to stress Hamilton's own literary knowledge. Placing this and other similar references in quotation marks means that the intertextuality of “The Skylark – Caged and Free” is underscored even for those readers who might not recognize the quotations. As a working-class poet, this passage suggests, Hamilton perceives herself as more in tune with the “prison song” of the captured lark than the free bird in nature. In fact, the image of the caged skylark had considerable currency among working-class poets. References include this late poem by Massey:

Captured larks were blinded because blinding was believed to improve their song, and Massey's larks here also have been killed to serve the fashions of upper-class society; the poem thus has a clear social agenda. While this fragment was unpublished, Hamilton could well have known Macfarlan's take on this image in “A Tale of the Town”:

Two poems by Anderson, “The Dead Lark” (Songs 138) and “The Caged Lark” (Later 175), also compare the skylark to the defeated or trapped working-class poet. “Fanny Forrester” likewise wrote of the “lowly bard” in her eponymous poem, published five years after Hamilton's in Ben Brierley's Journal: “He tunes his lyre in sickly court and alley,/ Where the caged lark, though captive, boldly sings”(Maidment 157). As Susan Zlotnick has pointed out in a fine article on “The Lowly Bard,” Forrester's male hero is placed in a strongly feminized position – and the image of the caged bird, which has traditional resonances with slavery but is also a significant symbol of women's position in society, furthers this sense of a loss of masculine agency.

If the skylark represents simultaneously the idealized Romantic bard and the imprisoned working-class poet, plus carrying an implicit commentary on female entrapment, Hamilton manages to identify with all of these positions without wholly aligning herself with any. Her lark causes her to remember nostalgically the rural scenes of her youth, now a “lost Paradise,” but also to reflect upon her own status as a blind poet:

This passage hints at Milton's blindness in Paradise Lost. Hamilton's inclusion of these poetic echoes suggests a considerable claim for her own status as poet. Her conclusion that her song and the lark's will be “blent” looks back twenty lines to her memory of a wild skylark:

But this free lark is also effectively confined in literary reference. “Sings at heaven's gate” blends two Shakespearean allusions: “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings” from Cymbeline (2.3.19), and, more significantly, from sonnet 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes”: “Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate” (10–12). The movement from despair to acceptance and contentment in this sonnet parallels Hamilton's shifts of tone within “The Skylark – Caged and Free.” Whether by accident or design (and the fact that leaving out “hymns” allows her line to scan within the iambic pentameter suggests the latter), Hamilton misquotes her source material to odd effect: “hark” invites us to listen, but what we are listening to are words owned neither by Hamilton nor by Shakespeare, but a fusion of the two.

Hamilton's skylark is very much not singing alone, given that the real-life, remembered bird slides into a literary stereotype whose “notes” are borrowed from a long tradition of poetic usage. This points to the underlying message of the poem: as a working-class poet, Hamilton too does not sing alone and the words in which she expresses her view of poetry are not entirely her own. Between the Romantic model of “singing alone” in nature, and the “Babel rude of many a tongue” in the city, Hamilton seems to advocate a middle way, blending her song with that of the literary lark to create a hybrid form of poetry, drawing on both working-class and high poetic culture. This is further emphasized by the placement of this poem on the facing page to a facsimile of Hamilton's self-taught handwriting. Separated by a thin sheet of tissue paper, Hamilton's crude lettering in heavy black ink forms a peculiar contrast to “The Skylark – Caged and Free,” a poem steeped in literary allusion and conscious of the tradition preceding it.

Hamilton, Massey, Young, et al. were writing for a readership that comprised both the middle-class patrons and purchasers of their volumes and the original, primarily working-class, readers of those poems reprinted from journals and local newspapers. Like Massey's “Babe Christabel,” the self-consciousness of the allusions in “The Skylark – Caged and Free” suggests that Hamilton does expect her readers to recognize them. Of course, this recognition could create various problems. Many nineteenth-century working-class poets were criticized for plagiarism and imitation – Alexander Smith's reputation suffered a heavy blow when the Athenaeum published a piece showing the origin of his images in Keats and other writers and Carlyle famously lamented the “tang of the Circulating Libraries” found in Ebenezer Elliot.Footnote ⁹ But, as the poems discussed above show, what some contemporaries read as plagiarism or unauthorized borrowing also can be seen as an intelligent and deliberate form of manipulating allusion.Footnote ¹⁰ For poets who were aware of the virtual impossibility of their ever entering the poetic canon, and who tended to publish their work in ephemeral forms, often anonymously, allusion to the canonical works of Victorian poetry was not always a “benign appropriation” which shored up the sense of a poetic community (Ricks 33). Rather, it could be a means of simultaneously challenging the notion of a shared poetic ethos amongst all nineteenth-century poets and of advocating it, asserting these poets’ rights and ability to use the language and forms of high poetic discourse while highlighting their exclusion and difference. The poems discussed here have, as Vicinus says of Massey, “a peculiar sense of emptiness” and bear witness to the displacement and “disconnection from the language of his poetry” that Richard Cronin finds in Alexander Smith, because their language and forms are so clearly derivative and their ends are not always apparent (Vicinus 104, Cronin 137). The distance between these poems and the Cento sonnet, literally pieced together out of others’ words, might seem negligible. Indeed, if the Cento sonnet were created as more of a communal effort by a “group of young friends” than by Hamilton alone, it would at least possess a sense of joint authorship and community lacking in poems that seek a connection with other poets, but can only do so by reflecting the author's reading habits. All these poets draw attention to the difficulty of singing alone, as working-class writers, but also to the equally difficult task involved in grafting different poetic voices and registers together. By perceiving such works as consciously hybrid, uneasily blending a politicized working-class poetics with the language and style of Tennyson or Wordsworth, we can see that they complicate our sense, as twenty-first century critics, of the relations of working-class poets to their better-known predecessors and contemporaries.