‘The altar ran with human gore’: Investigating the Poetical Politics of Mary Hutton

Meagan Timney

My paper discusses the working-class poet, Mary Hutton (1794-?), the “wife of a poor pen-knife cutter in Sheffield,” and her important role in the formation of working-class political discourse in Victorian poetry. This paper serves as a contribution to broader historical and cultural research on the working classes in Britain as well as the history of English poetry, and is part of a larger project that investigates the construction of working-class women’s poetic identities and their negotiation of politics, femininity, class and sexuality. I ask how gender complicates the political rubric of the working-class, and attend to the ways in which the poems in Hutton’s Cottage Tales and Poems (1842) participate in Victorian discourses of class and empire.

I begin with an examination of Hutton’s “Cadet Revolution” poems: “On the Occupation of Cracow,” and “Polish Song,” as an entry into my discussion of Hutton’s involvement with nineteenth-century politics. I argue that Hutton’s ostensibly outwardly directed poetic lens reflects inward to engage directly with the “Condition of England Question.” To illustrate, I will perform close readings of “On a Poor Little Sweep,” and “Benefit of the Poor of the Town.” Finally, I turn to the highly polemic “Eva,” in which the poet looks back to the Norman Invasion, and castigates the public celebration of the marriage of Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, and the lady Eva, daughter of Dermot, King of Leinster, whilst “dead bodies of the murdered citizens were lying unburied in the streets.” By attending to both formalist and political elements of Hutton’s poetry, I ultimately argue that Hutton creates a place for and empowers the working-class woman writer by directly engaging with nineteenth-century national politics.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. London: Routledge,

1993.

Ashton, Owen and Roberts, Stephen. The Victorian Working-Class Writer. London: Cassell, 1999.

Boos, Florence S. “‘Nurs'd Up Amongst the Scenes I Have Describ’d’: Political Resonances in the Poetry of Working-Class Women.” Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Ed. Christine L. Krueger. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. 137-56.

Christmas, William. “The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in

English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830.” Stafford Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 286-287.

Forsyth, Margaret. “‘Too Boldly’ for a Woman: Text, Identity and the Working-Class Woman Poet.” Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts. Ed. Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 18-34.

Forsyth, Margaret. “Looking for Grandmothers: Working-Class Women Poets and ‘herstory’.” Women's Writing 12.2 (2005): 259-347.

Hutton, Mary. Cottage Tales and Poems. Sheffield: J. Blurton, 1842.

Maidment, Brian. The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian

Britain. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987.

Murphy, Paul Thomas. Toward a Working-Class Canon. Columbus: Ohio State UP,

1994.

Sanders, Michael. “Poetic Agency: Metonymy and Metaphor in Chartist Poetry, 1838-

1852.” Victorian Poetry 39.2 (Summer 2001): 111-35.

Schwarzkopf, Jutta. Women in the Chartist Movement. New York: St. Martin's,

1991.

Slinn, E. Warwick. Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative

Language. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.

Zlotnick, Susan. “‘A Thousand Times I’d Be a Factory Girl’: Dialect, Domesticity, and

Working-Class Women’s Poetry in Victorian Britain.” Victorian Studies 35.1 (Autumn 1991): 7-27.

Zlotnick, Susan. Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution. Baltimore: John

Hopkins UP, 1998.