CULTURE
If we have suffered acute privations in the old slave state, so galling that we cannot look back upon them without pain, let us prepare ourselves for the mid-day of freedom, that even now glances her rays upon us. (Thomson, p. 24)
Recounting the familiar milestones of life – entering the workforce, learning a trade, getting married, rearing a family – formed the mainstay of many autobiographies. So it is not for nothing that they have also formed the mainstay of our narrative. But to confine ourselves to retelling the material side of our life during the industrial revolution would be a great disservice to our writers. After all, the autobiographer who confined himself to writing about the daily grind was relatively rare. There, jostling for space with the practical side of earning a living, were all the other things that made a life worth while, and an autobiography worth writing.
Alexander Somerville, in describing his older brother James, captured this other part of life. In the opening pages of his autobiography, and before getting down to telling his own story, Somerville wrote about each member of his family in turn. When he came to James he noted that, as a child, James had been looked upon as ‘the most intelligent member of our family’. His fondness and facility for reading and his fine memory had set him apart from the rest of the children in the village. Yet James' childhood talents had never translated into anything tangible in adulthood. He left the family home in early adolescence to take up a position as a cooper's apprentice, and so he continued, making barrels for Britain's ever expanding drinks industry, till the end of his days. Somerville thought his talents had been wasted. He concluded:
Whether the world is the better in having a tradesman who puts hoops upon its barrels, saws its timber, makes its bedsteads, and nails its coffins, and does all those things honestly and to the best of his mechanical ability, instead of contributing to its literature and philosophy with a graceful pen and a strong mind, I shall not determine. But if it be a loss to the world not to have more literature and philosophy than it possesses, it has sustained a loss in the mis-employment of your uncle James.1
There was a sentiment behind Somerville's assessment of his brother's fortunes with which many of the autobiographers would have heartily concurred: that working men had more to offer this world than their labour. Running through this extraordinary body of working-class literature was the unshakeable belief that men such as themselves had the capacity to make a contribution to the cultural, religious and political life of the nation. It was accomplishments such as these that turned working men into what one autobiographer called the ‘sons of freedom’. And it is to this, the cultural sphere, that we shall now turn.