Leisure’s Epitaph

Letters

Vol. 29 No. 8 · 26 April 2007

From Kathleen Bell

I was startled by John Pemble’s assertion that ‘the masses’ in the Victorian period lack individual voices (LRB, 8 March). Working-class Victorians expressed themselves in print as well as writing letters, diaries and private memoirs. Accounts of leisure were produced by writers as diverse as Joseph Skipsey, Janet Hamilton, Philip Connell and Sergeant Jowett, while publications edited by William and Mary Howitt, for example, gave space to numerous working-class writers. Autobiographies, such as those collected by the social historian John Burnett, and studies such as Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes demonstrate that there was a wide enthusiasm for writing. Parliamentary reports, too, convey a wealth of factual information (for example, on church outings) in their accounts of interviews with workers.

Kathleen Bell
Beeston, Nottinghamshire