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Working-Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Peter Gurney
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2006, pp. 51 - 71
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

The romantic figure of the working-class writer has long attracted the attention of students of Victorian popular culture. Immortalized most famously perhaps by the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper in his well-known autobiography, the autodidact with literary pretensions—emblematic of both the heroism and failures of the wider class—fascinated contemporary middle-class intellectuals such as Charles Kingsley, the Christian Socialist leader.Footnote 1 The imagination of modern social historians has been similarly fired, and we now know a good deal about the lives and productions of many individuals who were prepared to sacrifice what little spare time and money they possessed to follow their muse, often ruining health and family life in the process. Important work has appeared on their distinctive and sometimes original contribution, particularly in the field of dialect literature.Footnote 2 Most were motivated by a pressing need to communicate their experience and expected little or no monetary reward for their labors. This was hardly surprising given the difficulties encountered by those who were foolhardy enough to quit the workshop or the factory in order to pursue a literary career full time. As Nigel Cross notes in the single study that explores this theme in depth, “The history of these working-class writers is a relatively dismal catalogue of inadequate and cavalier patronage, groundless optimism and commercial failure.”Footnote 3

Although a useful generalization, there were important exceptions to it. This article focuses particularly on the life and literary output of Thomas Frost, one of the few working-class writers in England in the second half of the nineteenth century who managed to support himself and his family successfully from the sale of the products of his mind and pen.Footnote 4 He is a remarkable but elusive character. The first volume of Frost's autobiography, Forty Years Recollections, Literary and Political (1880), is often referred to by historians of Chartism, but Frost himself exists largely in the footnotes of their texts and has not attracted serious study.Footnote 5 This lack of interest can be accounted for by the fact that after an initial enthusiastic phase, Frost drifted out of radical politics in the late 1840s and became a relatively isolated, geographically and socially mobile individual, who managed to scratch a precarious living from writing. Partly the product of a metropolitan “underworld” characterized by “a mélange of blasphemy, radical politics and millenarian Christianity,” Frost lived and worked between cultures and moved easily from coffeehouse to public meeting, music hall to newspaper office.Footnote 6 For him there was no straightforward transition from the unrespectable phase of popular politics before mid-century to the moral probity of the mid-to-late Victorian period; rather there was a dogged struggle for self-expression and survival.

Frost wrote with sympathy and understanding about the radical tradition, but what makes him such an interesting figure is that he also rescued for posterity groups and individuals who were liminal in a much wider sense. In his works, defeated radicals rub shoulders with gypsies, smugglers, jail-breakers, cross-dressers, and circus performers. Frost was a fan of the escapologist Redmond, for example, who introduced the celebrated rope trick to the London music hall in the 1860s and even taught himself the art. Redmond would have someone bind him tightly with rope and lock him in a cabinet, then escape. Hoping to catch Redmond out, a wealthy West End butcher once wagered publicly that he could untie the rope in a given time. Frost delighted in the story: “It was very soon seen that the butcher was at fault; he could not find either end of the rope. He sought in Redmond's boots, up his sleeves, inside his vest, but the rope seemed endless. He fumed, he perspired, as the seconds grew into minutes, and the minutes swiftly chased each other down the stream of time; but no end could he discover. Time was called, and the butcher's wager was lost. Redmond was then enclosed in the cabinet again, and in less than two minutes he was free.”Footnote 7 Redmond was highly adept at extricating himself from tight places, for that was how he made a living. But could Frost so easily escape the constraints against which he struggled along with so many other working-class writers?

The key question explored below was initially prompted by Bourdieu's paradox: “Resistance may be alienating and submission may be liberating.”Footnote 8 I am especially interested in the possible effects of employing the dominant language and writing for money on an individual from a subaltern class like Frost. Other Victorian working-class writers worried about this, including the radical cooperator G. J. Holyoake, who once likened the situation of the working-class intellectual to that of Plutarch's hero Eumenes, forced to employ “mean applications and entreaties” when captured by his enemies and thus “put his mind into the power of the man who was only master of his body.”Footnote 9 Criticizing those commentators who have simply celebrated working-class resistance to the dominant language, exemplified by the use of “low” or vulgar discourse, Bourdieu has emphasized the liberating effects submission to the dominant language can have for subaltern individuals and groups. This article considers how Frost himself handled and later made sense of the dialectic of resistance and submission and how that dialectic exerted a shaping influence on his literary productions or discourse. Frost used the written word to improve his situation and his life opens a window onto a relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of working-class culture; through a case study of his career and ideology we are better able to understand the complex experience of social mobility in a society characterized by fairly impermeable class boundaries, particularly the boundary between the working and middle classes. As Savage and Miles have pointed out, there was a two-hundred-to-one chance against a skilled worker's son entering the established middle class before World War One, so Frost is certainly a rare and atypical figure. But it is precisely his marginality that can help illuminate the wider society within which he sought recognition and acceptance.Footnote 10

This article is divided into four main sections. The first asks why a working-class radical like Frost desired to become a professional writer and then examines how he gained the self-possession and material support necessary to achieve that aim. Second, I disinter Frost's historical imagination, particularly his fascination with the debris of capitalist “progress,” and suggest how that obsession underpinned his politics and connected to his own cultural liminality.Footnote 11 The third section then discusses Frost's attitude to formal politics in more detail, especially his attachment to popular liberalism, and underlines his conditional support for that heterogeneous political ideology. Finally, Frost is briefly compared to other successful working-class writers who produced for different literary markets in order to reemphasize how structure and language, the context and the work, ought to be treated as part of an indissoluble historical process.Footnote 12

Finding a Voice, Inventing a Persona

Thomas Frost was born in Croydon on 16 December 1821. His father was a radical tailor who read William Cobbett's Register and took an active part in the agitation that preceded the Great Reform Act. After four years at a day school, Frost commenced work in 1836 as an apprentice compositor in a printing office and the year after attended an Owenite socialist meeting, at which Robert Owen spoke, at Norwood. However, as Frost later recalled in his autobiography, it was not until he had read “the grand and wondrous poems of Shelley” a few years later that he fully grasped “the connexion between the influence of circumstances in the formation of character and the new organization which Owen desired to give society.”Footnote 13 The young Frost wanted above all to lead “a truly Christian life”—Coleridge's Religious Musings had also made a deep impression on him—but he eventually put aside his misgivings concerning Owen's infidelism and converted wholeheartedly to communitarianism; in the early 1840s he made several unsuccessful attempts to join or establish Owenite communities. From 1842, following a meeting with Jem Blackaby, a local Chartist leader, Frost also advocated political reform as a complementary solution to the problem of working-class oppression and exploitation.Footnote 14

When his employer went bankrupt before he had completed his apprenticeship, Frost ended up as a “turn-over” in London, at a shop in Holywell Street owned by William Dugdale, the notorious purveyor of “Satanic” literature.Footnote 15 Soon after he tried to set up as a printer on his own in Croyden. His parents had given him the money to buy an Albion press, but he soon found that he could not compete with the London steam presses. Technologies and social relations in the printing industry were revolutionized, especially in London, during the early nineteenth century. Steam printing was adopted by The Times as early as 1814, and other innovations followed; compositors were badly hit by unemployment, and the tramping system was fast breaking down.Footnote 16 Frost's early working life was therefore marked by uncertainty and disruption. He moved back to London and commenced writing and editing radical journals, reviving the Communist Chronicle with the middle-class Owenite Goodwyn Barmby for a short while in 1846.Footnote 17

Unable to adequately support himself by means of radical journalism, Frost decided to try his hand at writing serialized fiction for a mass audience. He had been introduced to the world of books at an early age and had avidly read all the works—mainly periodicals—found in his maternal grandmother's parlor.Footnote 18 Drawing inspiration from the framed prints of Hogarth's “Harlot's Progress” that hung from the walls of this room and taking Eugene Sue as a model, he wrote the penny serial novel Emma Mayfield, which was published without Frost's name on the title page by Caffyn in 1848. Set in the late eighteenth century, this semipornographic narrative (the heroine is raped by numerous upper-class debauchees including the Prince of Wales) contrasted the morality of the poor with the hypocrisy of the rich. By turns censorious and titillating, the message was clear enough: “Whitehall in the reign of Charles II, the Louvre in the time of Louis XV, was never the scene of such degrading profligacy, such depraved voluptuousness, such low orgies, as Carlton House during the regency of the Prince of Wales. … The entire life of this prince was one of profligacy and crime.”Footnote 19 The novel proved a great success—around ten thousand copies of the complete work were sold—and Frost was emboldened on his chosen course.

Not surprisingly, Frost plumped for literature because it seemed to promise a better life. Following the success of Emma Mayfield, he sold his press, moved to a small cottage on Croydon Common, and embarked on what he called, “the flowery path of fiction.” But the historical romances he wrote flopped, and he remembered this chastening disappointment with more than a touch of irony: “This was a state of things which I had had no reason to anticipate when I cast from me the cares and anxieties of business, picturing to myself the pleasantness of smoking my pipe in a flower-perfumed bower, after the literary labors of the day, and listening to the melody of the blackbird and the thrush.”Footnote 20 In later years, Frost took delight in deflating the romantic myth of the creative writer, but, initially at least, he experienced literature as a kind of escape.Footnote 21 There are parallels here with those Saint-Simonian artisans in France who longed for a new life: as Jacques Rancière has observed, “The more enlightened workers were seeking intellectual growth, an escape from the worker's world.”Footnote 22 Unfortunately for Frost, not only were print technologies in the process of transition, but the forms of popular literature were also rapidly changing as the penny number trade was being superseded by periodicals like Reynolds's Miscellany and the London Journal at this time.Footnote 23

Frost's literary ambitions require some explanation. After all, many working men and women in the nineteenth century came to make sense of themselves and their times by means of the written word; some even got into print, though the vast majority did not expect to make much money from the publication of their memories. Most working-class writers simply did not have the chance of a career in literature. More important, the talented or lucky few who could have made this choice preferred not to live in what George Gissing memorably described as “the valley of the shadow of books.”Footnote 24 One of Frost's own heroes, the Chartist shoemaker-poet Jem Blackaby, made no attempt to find a wider audience for his poems: “If they were read by a few friends in his own sphere, he was content; and many of them were never finished, or became illegible through being written with a pencil and carried loose in his pocket,” Frost recalled.Footnote 25 Other radical working men, better placed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the expansion of the press after mid-century, were also loath to make a living from writing; for example, the journalist W. E. Adams reckoned the sale of mental labor to be little more than “a prostitution of the intellect.”Footnote 26

Frost was motivated to become an author both by the need to communicate a radical message and by a negative experience of manual labor. New opportunities were opening up in the form of a mass reading public and of a national radical movement, and this enterprising young man reckoned he could help supply the growing demand for printed works. But in order to become a professional writer and fulfill what Foucault has termed the “author function,” Frost literally had to reinvent himself as an “author.”Footnote 27 Disciplined and molded in important ways by market pressures, modern authors invent personas and work within forms (albeit usually unconsciously) that enable them to address specific audiences. Raymond Williams and others have noted this phenomenon in their critiques of George Orwell's oeuvre where, despite the apparent authenticity of the authorial voice, who one meets over and over again is not the “real” Orwell but the fictive Orwell persona.Footnote 28 Similarly, Frost also developed a distinctive voice in an effort to win readers and satisfy editors and publishers. The fabrication of this authorial persona deserves closer scrutiny.

Frost was extremely revealing about the process of becoming a working-class author, especially in the second volume of autobiography. Though he wrote fluent, grammatically correct prose, Frost recognized that he could not depend on his limited descriptive powers alone. “I did not credit myself with genius, or emulate the fame of the inimitable Dickens; but I had confidence in my possession of a quality which, when combined with a moderate degree of literary ability, is more useful to its possessor, if he does not happen to have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, than the greatest amount of genius that ever burned, and fretted, and wore its unfortunate possessor into an untimely grave; I mean tact.”Footnote 29 Thus the notion of genius, as well as the related figure of the romantic artist, was given fairly short shrift.Footnote 30 Instead Frost knew early on that his future depended on tact, the ability to produce a discourse that appealed to as many potential consumers as possible, and to negotiate social relationships with middle-class editors and publishers. Moreover, he still wanted to impart a radical critique of society to readers, regardless of their social or educational qualifications. The publisher of his first novel confided to him that manuscripts were sometimes given out to housemaids or machine-boys for their opinion, so Frost had a clear idea of the kinds of readers who would have to grapple with his texts. The task then was how to satisfy the commercial imperatives of the publisher and simultaneously smuggle his “metaphysics” and “views of social economy” into the work.Footnote 31

Frost acutely felt the pleasures and pains of authorship. He received payment by post for contributions to Papers for the People in 1850 and later recalled that when he saw the check for £15 the “discovery almost took away my breath.” He looked up his own name in the catalog of the British Museum some years afterward and was proud that it appeared in the lists.Footnote 32 But in the second autobiography he also lamented the anonymity that, for him at any rate, had accompanied authorship. Following the death of his mother in 1875, he returned briefly to Croyden where he found himself “as completely forgotten as if I had never lived there.” Fellow apprentices failed to recognize him, and the earlier generation of radicals had mostly died or quit the town.Footnote 33 Frost drew attention to this experience of loss and isolation: “Flattering, was it not? Here was one of their own townsmen, whose name had become known in the literary world, and whose works had been criticized in the reviews and the newspapers, living in their midst, and they knew it not, never thought of associating with the authorship of books which bore his name on the title-page the man with whose form and face they had been familiar on public platforms, and in the business life of the town thirty years before.”Footnote 34 Many working-class radicals readily condemned the fickleness of the common people in the late nineteenth century—Thomas Cooper's voice is one of the best known perhapsFootnote 35—and indeed traces of this reaction can be found in Frost's work. But the dominant tone in this passage and elsewhere was not bitterness but sadness. Frost succeeded in transforming himself into an author, but this process had removed him from the place and the people he loved and had exiled him as a stranger.Footnote 36

As we gain a better picture, it becomes apparent that Frost was a particular kind of author, a relatively independent producer who wrote for different kinds of readers. His ill-fated fictional efforts, as we have seen, were directed mainly at a plebeian audience. But his nonfiction met a growing middle-class taste for “otherness,” and he shaped his journalism to fit local political constituencies. Frost wrote at least six “Salisbury Square fictions” during the 1850s, edited Cassell's Magazine of Art in 1854, published a gory account of the Indian Mutiny, then wrote leaders for a number of provincial Liberal newspapers, including the Birmingham Journal, until the early 1870s. Journalism was Frost's bread and butter, but he also continued to publish nonfiction on a wide variety of topics including travel, circuses and fairs, secret revolutionary societies, biography, and so on. In the early 1880s he worked as a subeditor on newspapers in South Yorkshire and Liverpool, arduous and unrewarding labor, which Frost bitterly recounted in the second autobiographical volume, Reminiscences of a Country Journalist, which appeared in 1886. Despite his tact Frost still found it difficult to make a decent living from writing. Authors were underpaid and easily exploited by publishers and editors of popular newspapers and journals in the nineteenth century, and Frost later recalled that he was frequently at his “wits’ end” with money worries.Footnote 37

Not surprisingly then, his most productive periods (in terms of books written and published) coincided with material improvement due either to steady employment or a small legacy; four major works appeared in the mid-1870s following the death of a spinster aunt who bequeathed him a quarter of her modest estate. Despite this good fortune, Frost was still struggling when the second volume of memoirs was published. Personal finances were a major theme in Reminiscences; he sharply criticized a review of the first volume of autobiography, which had inserted Frost's life within the Victorian romance of upward social mobility, for deliberately misrepresenting the simple facts of the matter:

It was remarked that my Chartism had been useful to me in what is known as “getting on in the world,” as it helped me to become “a successful journalist.” Let us see what this means, when tested by the facts. My gains from the field of labor I was supposed to have cultivated so successfully have never exceeded 100 guineas per year, and my entire income from journalistic and other literary undertakings combined have never exceeded 200 guineas, an amount which I received, in fact for only one year, when I edited a periodical, wrote leaders and leaderettes for two newspapers, and was an occasional contributor for two or three other publications. Is this what the Athenaeum reviewer understands as successful journalism?Footnote 38

Frost went on to reveal that his income was now only sixty guineas a year from the earlier inheritance, hardly much to show for a lifetime of work. The prospects were not good either as younger journalists received preference, and “the work to be done is insufficient to employ all the labourers who press into the field.” Frost's financial situation worsened after the publication of Reminiscences, and he applied to the Royal Literary Fund for assistance a total of thirteen times between 1887 and his death, at the age of eighty-six, on 16 July 1908.Footnote 39 His letters to the Fund's secretary, A. Llewelyn Roberts, were respectful, sometimes quite desperate, but never deferential. Thanking the secretary for a £30 grant in 1901, for example, Frost reminded him that “in less than six months I shall have completed the eightieth year of a life of hard work.”Footnote 40 It would be difficult to overemphasize the pressure exerted by material exigencies on Frost's life and discourse, but what is striking is the creative way he handled these constraints.

The second volume of memoirs presented a lucid critique of these pressures, analyzing in detail (five years before Gissing's New Grub Street) the ways in which literature had become a competitive industry in Victorian England. Frost demonstrated how the capitalist market for print, regulated by the law of supply and demand, had determined the pace and quality of his work as well as its meaning. He saw himself clearly as an intellectual laborer employed by a burgeoning capitalist business, and in the preface to this text he referred to himself as one of the many “who work as methodically and as regularly as artisans, and support themselves and their families by the products of their brains.”Footnote 41 Like wage labor generally, authorship was characterized by its own particular forms of exploitation, which Frost delineated before remarking: “Perhaps I have been exceptionally unfortunate; but I believe I am within the bounds of fact in stating that of every half-dozen manuscripts which I have sent to the editors of magazines only one has been accepted, while three have been returned, and two neither returned nor accepted.”Footnote 42 When times were particularly hard he had to undertake slop work—writing stories to accompany a set of engravings, for instance—or act as a ghost writer for various bourgeois clients, named by Frost in this text. But even anonymity could sometimes bring unexpected rewards; Frost was both amused and delighted when a chapter he had contributed to a work on South America was “described by the reviewer of the Economist as ‘the best in the book.’”Footnote 43 One solution to the problems that faced producers was organization, and Frost attended the first meeting and joined the National Association of Journalists at Sheffield in the autumn of 1884.Footnote 44 But there was a more immediate remedy to hand, and in fact Frost used the second volume of autobiography, his last major work, to contextualize and reclaim the intellectual products that had been appropriated from him over the course of a difficult but creative life.Footnote 45

At the Margins of History

I wish now to consider the historical and political vision of my protagonist. Frost's critique of the mid- and late Victorian polity was underpinned by a particular representation of the past, and it is to that representation that we should first turn our attention. Frost's historical imagination was intimately bound up with his own liminality; throughout his life he lived on the boundary between “high” and “low” cultures, respectability and roughness, and this undoubtedly drew him closer to persons and movements that had been forgotten or marginalized. Frost was obsessed by the debris that the triumphant progress of capitalist civilization had left behind in its wake; this passion runs like a guiding thread through his work as a whole.

One of the lost souls memorialized in Recollections and elsewhere was the Chartist shoemaker-poet, Jem Blackaby, perhaps the most important single influence on Frost besides Coleridge, Shelley, and Owen. Frost was not only impressed by Blackaby's knowledge of the radical theories of the time but also by the fact that he had fully appropriated these ideas and debated them “from his own point of view, with rare impartiality, and with a fluency of expression, a command of language, and a degree of argumentative ability, not often met with even amongst those who have enjoyed the highest educational advantages.”Footnote 46 Frost knew that this man, who as we have noted shunned a wider fame, would leave little trace on the written historical record and did what he could to make amends. Similarly, just after he moved to Barnsley in 1882, Frost heard that a well-known local Chartist leader had just died. He immediately interviewed remaining veterans and consulted records that were to hand. “The Life and Times of John Vallance,” which highlighted the revolutionary temper of South Yorkshire from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through to the early 1840s, was serialized in the Barnsley Times, a Conservative organ that Frost was editing on a temporary basis. Thoroughly chagrined, his employers did not renew his contract.Footnote 47

Finding a market for disreputable people and “low” domains was a major task and demanded great ingenuity or tact. Publishers had to be convinced that the author's account was objective and also, more importantly, that the demand for the product warranted publication. Sometimes this proved impossible even for Frost. He had to abandon the idea of a full-length study of social utopias in the 1870s, for example. On the whole, however, he was highly successful in this task, publishing histories of fairs, circuses, conjurors, and secret revolutionary societies with the sympathetic publisher William Tinsley during this decade. His fictional work was peopled by scores of gypsies, smugglers, and highwaymen who lived by their own alternative, often superior, codes of justice and morality. His second novel, Paul the Poacher (1848), was set just after the Napoleonic Wars and took the iniquities of the game laws as its focus. In this work, the gypsies and smugglers protect the protagonist from a repressive and immoral state and from scheming knaves like Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth.Footnote 48 Many similar examples could be cited, and in his autobiography Frost noted that such groups had once played an important role within the local culture in the Croydon area. Recalling that he had seen his aunt with a bottle of illegal gin, Frost asserted that smugglers had once commanded “the sympathies of the people,” who did not believe that a “Parliament representing only the wealthy” had the right to levy such heavy duty on their goods. The result was a prolonged conflict between “the natural rights of the majority and the laws made by the representatives of the minority.”Footnote 49

Despite this agenda, Frost was quite meticulous as a historian and felt obliged to verify facts in his nonfiction, which was particularly important when the subject matter was likely to be controversial. In the preface to his two-volume study of secret societies published in 1876, he discussed the methodological problems involved in researching the hidden history of the United Irishmen or the Carbonari. Frost assured readers that much dubious information had been cut from the final version and that he had “admitted no statement” that he did not have “every reason to regard as the truth.”Footnote 50 Although the work was marked by its impartial tone throughout and had an obvious antiquarian appeal (thus making it more attractive to the publisher Tinsley), the notion of a persistent revolutionary underground tradition could simultaneously comfort those ultraradicals who had reluctantly learned to live in quiet hate in Victorian England. Objectivity also characterized the biography of the “wicked Lord Lyttelton” published the same year, a text that neatly demonstrates the blurring of boundaries between “high” and “low” cultures and Frost's own position on the margins of both worlds.Footnote 51 He approached the life of this late eighteenth century libertine as a historiographical problem, arguing that the rumors put around by Horace Walpole after Lyttelton's early death had been accepted much too readily by historians. After a critical assessment of the authenticity of Lyttleton's letters, a major source for the study, Frost went on to portray this independent man as a complex character influenced by the revolutionary temper of the age and stressed that the meaning of his life at any point could not simply be read-off from his shameful end. He also hoped, of course, that such a rakish, controversial subject would find a ready market.Footnote 52

Frost's commitment to temporarily lost causes did not mean that he had rejected the notion of progress in toto—in fact his first volume of autobiography was framed as a progressive narrative. Nevertheless, his understanding of the meaning of progress was conditional and idiosyncratic. His contemporary account of the Indian Mutiny, for example, directly challenged the complacent belief in the progressive nature of the British Empire and criticized Parliament for trying to “under-rate the magnitude of the blow that had been struck at British domination and influence in the East.”Footnote 53 Moreover, Frost's pioneering histories of the fair and the circus—carnivalesque domains that some scholars have argued represented the repressed “other” of bourgeois identityFootnote 54—celebrated forms that had been largely drained of their subversive character by state regulation and capitalist concentration in the cultural field over the preceding century. He maintained that fairs had degenerated since the mid-eighteenth century when they “began to be voted low by persons of rank and fashion.” Thereafter the audience was split as actors, who had previously performed in theatrical booths at the fairs, moved to Drury Lane and Covent Garden. This process was encouraged by the state, which curtailed the duration of fairs and kept their political content under surveillance.Footnote 55 Circuses, according to Frost, though increasingly organized as large-scale capitalist enterprises, retained some of their subversive potential particularly in regard to gender, as artists who practiced cross-dressing continued to fascinate audiences. The world-turned-upside-down theme was epitomized for Frost by an equestrian performer named Ella, whose “face and form” drew thousands of admirers in the late 1840s until it was revealed that “the beautiful, the graceful, the accomplished Ella, was not a woman, but a man!”Footnote 56 The idea of progress was still useful in certain respects, however, and in his study of Victorian magicians Frost contrasted the materialist practice of conjurors with the deceitful trickery of the spiritualists who relied on a superstitious and gullible public for their success.Footnote 57 When Frost talked explicitly about progress toward the end of his life, he invariably pointed out that any meaningful improvement in the future could only be secured by the general empowerment of working-class people. “The true greatness of a nation,” he wrote, “must be measured by the condition of the masses. … This standard will be more and more the criterion of national power and influence as the working classes advance in education, sobriety, and union.”Footnote 58

Elastic Liberalism

A distinctive historical imagination and conceptual grasp underpinned and helped sustain Frost's present-centered politics. He aligned himself with liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote much of the time for audiences who also identified with this label, and was often dependent for his livelihood on Liberal employers. Frost's handling of this designation, how he defined and reworked liberalism in his own writings, warrants closer consideration. An influential body of historical work has approached Victorian liberalism as the locus of political forms and practices that enabled the effective harmonization of working-class and middle-class interests.Footnote 59 There is certainly something in this interpretation, but it seriously underestimates the continuing frictions within that unstable mix of groups and ideologies that made this political formation their temporary home.Footnote 60 Like a great many other nineteenth-century radicals, Frost undoubtedly believed that the democratic rights of the freeborn Englishman had once been enshrined in an ancient constitution, and he often employed what historians have referred to as the constitutional idiom to justify and explain his involvement in movements like Chartism.Footnote 61 In his first volume of autobiography, for example, he asserted that “the Chartist movement, so far from being revolutionary, was strictly constitutional, the ballot being the only one of the ‘six points’ which had not, at one time, been part and parcel of the Constitution.”Footnote 62 Like Gladstone and Bright, Frost sometimes employed a Micheletist language of “the people,” within which this key concept assumed an abstract, even spiritual significance, but he also used the language of “class” as we have already seen. It depended, to a large extent, on the timing of the intervention and the nature of the audience or market Frost was addressing. Employing a shared code was always a tricky business; as Bourdieu notes, “Communication between classes … always represents a critical situation for the language that is used.” Consequently, what Bourdieu refers to as “strategies of mutual accommodation” between representatives of different classes constantly run the risk of breaking down. Alternative meanings can then be exposed if sender or receiver makes a “gaff,” misjudges the situation or employs an inappropriate tone.Footnote 63 Despite his tact, Frost sometimes grew very impatient with the “strategies of mutual accommodation” within which his life and work were enmeshed, and this is borne out most clearly by his checkered career in journalism.

Frost understood Victorian liberalism as a complicated and volatile ideological formation. He was largely dependent upon the liberal owners of various provincial newspapers for his income and knew very well how varieties of liberalism could be manipulated to best advantage. Typically he was quite explicit about this latter and recalled some of the opportunities and constraints he had encountered in the course of his career:

Both the [Liverpool] Albion and The Birmingham Journal were then Liberal, but Liberalism is a very elastic term, admitting of many interpretations, as too-confiding electors have sometimes been taught by the difference between the professions made on the hustings and the course taken in parliament; and there was a marked difference between the Liberalism of the Journal and that of the Albion. Hence, while I had full swing for my Radicalism in the former journal, I was occasionally admonished to write more guardedly and vaguely for the latter, especially on the question of franchise extension, which I was told the merchants and shipowners of Liverpool cared nothing about. The Liberalism of the [Shrewsbury] Chronicle, though more earnest and decided than that of the Albion, which was tempered very much by local influences and commercial considerations, was less advanced than that of the Journal, clinging rather more than I liked to the traditional creed of the Whigs.Footnote 64

Over the years Frost became adept at fine tuning his political discourse to the specific market or audience he was addressing. But this did not mean that he was content merely to mimic the supposed opinions and beliefs of his readers, far from it. In each varied situation he pushed his readers in new directions, often to the limit of their political and moral horizons. Beneath the surface veneer of his avowed political affiliation lay “a Chartist, and something more,” a radical critic of society who repeatedly sought to test just how “elastic” a term liberalism was in practice.Footnote 65

And of course, sometimes the concept snapped, readers and editors got angry, and Frost lost his employment. Many examples could be given here, but two must suffice. Frost frequently discussed the issue of parliamentary reform in leaders written for the Whig Shrewsbury Chronicle in the mid- to late 1860s and emphasized the moderate nature of the measures proposed by all parties. After the Second Reform Bill was passed, Frost ridiculed Thomas Carlyle's fulminations about “a shooting of Niagara” and claimed to hear instead the sound “of a turbid and stagnant ditch.” Relying on his audience's lack of sympathy for Manchester liberalism later that year, he chided John Bright for failing to support the idea of working men candidates.Footnote 66 Such criticism drew little comment, but when Frost supported agricultural trade unionism and industrial action in Buckinghamshire—taken by men with families who “demand only the moderate sum of two shillings a day for their labour”—he was quickly silenced by the proprietors of the journal.Footnote 67 He managed to hold back for five years before being drawn into the fray again, but by this time the context was more heated as farm laborers were beginning to organize in the districts covered by the paper. Frost pointed out that unionism was inevitable and would ultimately benefit the smooth working of the laws of supply and demand, but such sophistry did little to pacify his antagonists.Footnote 68 Various “bucolic speakers” severely censured Frost at a meeting of Shrewsbury farmers in March 1872 for his advocacy of cooperative farming as a solution to the crisis in agriculture. He lost his post on the paper soon after.Footnote 69

Ten years later Frost, now over sixty, found himself tramping round the South Yorkshire countryside, covering stories for the Barnsley Times. As noted above, this was a Conservative paper, albeit one that had previously adopted a populist tone, but no questions had been asked about Frost's politics when he had taken control of the paper early in 1882. Sensing that the structure of local politics was about to change, Frost pitched his leaders at those working-class Tories whose support for the party was based on little more than habit. One way to do this was by attacking the undemocratic nature of liberalism, so Frost thus exposed Gladstone's attempt to stifle parliamentary debate with the cloture: “the arming of a bare majority with the power of closing the debate at any time partakes too much of the system of arbitrary government to be acceptable generally,” he wrote.Footnote 70 Further, he maintained that although a large body of opinion in the country desired ameliorative measures, the Liberal party was stuck in a rut and could not be relied upon to introduce any significant legislation.Footnote 71 The logic of Frost's argument was that, from a working-class perspective, there was little to choose between the Liberal and Tory parties. Attacking the Liberals was one thing, but laying out an alternative agenda was another. Frost backed off until the summer when it became apparent that his contract would not be renewed. (Remember he had previously resurrected John Vallance and the history of Barnsley Chartism in the Times.) Finally he declared his hand and prophesied that the differences between the political parties would be revealed when, in a few years’ time, “the long-anticipated disintegration of the Liberal party takes place, and the Whigs combine with the Conservatives, and the final struggle of the opposing forces, the Armageddon of the political future, takes place between the consolidated Conservative party and the Radicals.”Footnote 72 In many respects, like other men and women of his generation, Frost was unfortunate enough to have been born both too late and too soon. He was effectively shut out from the world of letters before he could comment on the political “Armageddon” that undermined the long-term viability of popular liberalism from the early 1890s.

Alternative Personas

Submission to the discipline of writing and publishing in the dominant language proved, to an extent, to be an empowering and liberating choice for Frost. Mental labor took him away from his home and community, though those left behind benefited in as much as they gained a confident, articulate representative who was able to defend and advance working-class interests in a commercialized public domain. Attempting to make sense of it all in his second volume of autobiography, Frost portrayed his life and labor as an active rather than passive form of submission that was always liable, in certain circumstances, to become open resistance; he stressed that his story was characterized more by struggle than success. He wrote from and often about the margins of society, deliberately aligning himself with the victims of progressive liberalism in the past and the present. Frost's position within particular commercialized literary markets shaped his practice and ideology, set certain limits on his discourse, but simultaneously conferred certain freedoms. He could not write exactly what he pleased but nevertheless consistently sought to question the vaunted achievements of Victorian capitalism and cut his own distinctive path whenever possible.Footnote 73 Frost was often able to exploit the taste of working- and middle-class readers for the exotic “other,” but as we have seen he also frequently managed to skillfully interweave his own “metaphysics” into his work. Although he eagerly joined the National Association of Journalists in 1884, in his autobiographical writings Frost represented himself as an individual critic rather than as a member of any collectivity, a wandering maverick with a realistic understanding of the social and political order.Footnote 74

A brief comparison between Frost and a few other writers from a subaltern background would be instructive at this juncture, for there were other ways one might survive as a working-class writer in Victorian England.Footnote 75 G. J. Holyoake, for example, who made a decent living from speaking, writing, and publishing, proved much more adept than Frost at networking and self-promotion from the beginning of his long career in radicalism. Representing himself as a free thought “martyr,”Footnote 76 Holyoake commanded support in various circles after mid-century. Well known among plebeian Owenites as an ex–Social Missionary, he was also taken up by leading metropolitan liberals, including J. S. Mill (who got Holyoake's son a job at the India Office) and was soon equally at home at the Whittington Club as he was on cooperative and secularist platforms.Footnote 77 By the late nineteenth century, Holyoake was frequently fêted as the “Grand Old Man” of the cooperative movement, whose historical and propagandist writings had done much to aid working-class independence, but he was also on friendly terms with leading liberal politicians and intellectuals.Footnote 78 In fine, Holyoake is best understood as a kind of “movement entrepreneur,” who wrote for rather different, and more determinate, linguistic markets than did Frost. Crucially, he also enjoyed direct patronage from sympathetic middle-class radicals at key moments, especially when illness and money trouble delayed writing projects.Footnote 79 Holyoake's tone and authorial persona were also vital to his cross-class appeal. Rather than tact, he plumped determinedly for “politeness,” much to the chagrin of fellow radicals like W. J. Linton, who reckoned that Holyoake sought to make men “polite, which he thinks is the same as politic.”Footnote 80 Thomas Cooper also turned his back: “Go on in your polite way,” he told Holyoake in 1853, “my old rugged path suits me better.”Footnote 81

The role of the movement entrepreneur was not the only solution possible to the problem of insecurity. A number of gifted Lancashire writers, most importantly Edwin Waugh and Ben Brierley, were able to improve their circumstances and status by producing dialect poetry and prose that enjoyed considerable appeal. In a sensitive reading, Patrick Joyce has shown how Waugh managed to successfully communicate the joys and sorrows of “the people” through his verse, and Brierley also tapped into this populist tradition.Footnote 82 However, and pace Joyce, both men owed their considerable success not only to the talented way they creatively explored the “democratic imaginary” but also, more mundanely, to carefully crafted networks of patronage and support, particularly in the Manchester area.Footnote 83 Brierley was fortunate, for instance, to receive help early on in his career from the influential radical publisher, Abel Heywood, but just as important were his connections with local Freemasons.Footnote 84 Rejecting his own Chartist past no doubt made it easier for Brierley to develop links with the latter. He did this explicitly in a volume published in 1863, which firmly established his credentials as a “writer” and portrayed the acute social and industrial protest of twenty years before as the doomed, hopeless efforts of a deluded “mob.”Footnote 85 Brierley was certainly much loved by the Lancashire working class, particularly for the comic yet always sympathetic way he represented the daily lives of common folk in their own words.Footnote 86 Importantly, his work was also enthusiastically consumed by middle-class antiquarians and folklorists keen to document the peculiarities of popular culture for posterity; expensive editions of his works were specifically produced for this market.Footnote 87 But even Brierley, who managed to make a good living from writing, eventually fell on hard times and was only saved from poverty in old age by a testimonial fund organized by the Freemasons.Footnote 88

Conclusions

As we have already seen, Frost made sense of his own life in terms of exile occasionally, though he eschewed any heroic representation of himself, unlike some other working-class writers, such as Holyoake, who liked to present himself as an “agitator” fighting on behalf of the people.Footnote 89 Frost preferred instead to play around with questions of identity and was most delighted when bourgeois critics were confounded by his frequent change of literary direction. In the preface to Reminiscences, for example, he observed that while one of these had conjectured that Frost must have been in the habit of “travelling from one fair to another, associating with clowns and acrobats,” another had believed him to be “a veteran revolutionist who has kept himself dark, and that his associates in the past have been the foreign refugees who haunt the cafes around Leicester Square.”Footnote 90 This playful, elliptical approach to his own authorial persona was combined with an insight into the meaning of his own practice; Frost never forgot that market relations had determined his intellectual production and had a keen sense of his own position as a laborer in the field of literature. I would argue that Frost's views were reinforced by his continuing liminality and position as a “picaresque proletarian.”Footnote 91 Fully recognizing the proletarian nature of his work, Frost remained, relatively speaking, an isolated, mobile figure shut out from the benefits and sense of belonging that working-class or middle-class association could confer. Although a number of historians have rightly underlined the centrality of gothic and melodramatic tropes in Victorian culture, picaresque elements also played a vital role in Frost's fiction.Footnote 92 Most importantly perhaps, in his autobiography (particularly the second volume), he plotted his own life as a picaresque tale, narrating the sometimes sensational, often amusing adventures of a vagabond, transgressive, working-class writer. And as I have stressed at various points, he considered himself to be a smuggler of kinds, though the contraband was no longer gin or tobacco but rather his own “metaphysics.”

A number of points—and an allegorical image—can be offered in conclusion. In his discussion of the problem of constructing a chronology appropriate to a history from below, John Harrison once suggested that we could “present the common people through a series of images rather than in a narrative.”Footnote 93 More recently, Carolyn Steedman has explored the image of the caged bird in her penetrating discussion of John Pearman's autobiography.Footnote 94 Fortunately, Thomas Frost himself left us a powerful image that enables the imaginative and theoretical comprehension of both his own life and the predicament of other working-class authors: the allegorical figure of the escapologist. As I noted in the introduction, Frost was an avid devotee of the London music hall and was fascinated by the rope trick that he saw performed by a young artist named Redmond and others in the mid-1860s. This interest grew into an obsession as he later recalled. The story is worth quoting in full.

Without having seen the modus operandi, or received any hint that would have elucidated the mystery, I had an idea of my own as to the manner in which the trick was performed, and this I determined to test by experiment. I bought a dozen yards of new cord, a little thicker than an ordinary clothes-line; and having some business at a printing-office in Westminster, I called there on my way home, with a coil of rope on my arm. The printer asking me, jocularly, if I was going to hang myself, I acquainted him with the object of the purchase, and was asked to make an experiment on the spot. I allowed myself to be tied up, one end of the cord being secured about my right wrist, and then tied round the left, both arms being afterwards bound to my sides. As the operator began to pass the cord round my chest, I quietly inflated my lungs as much as possible, believing that precaution to be essential to the successful performance of the feat. The cord having been tightly drawn round my body several times, was passed over my shoulders and brought down to my legs, which were securely bound together. Then I was shut up alone in the reading-closet, and immediately began my efforts to release myself. In studying the rationale of the business before buying the rope, I had not been unmindful of what I had somewhere read as to the manner in which the notorious burglar and prison-breaker, Jack Sheppard, was able to slip his hands out of the handcuffs. I had found that by depressing the knuckles of the index-finger and the little finger, and turning the thumb inward, the circumference of the hand became very little more than that of the wrist. I now turned the discovery to account, and in a few seconds had slipped my right hand out of the hempen bracelet. With my right hand at liberty, a very few seconds sufficed to free the left and my legs; and as the cord was already slack about my body, owing to the inflation of my lungs while it was being drawn round me, I was free within the three minutes that Redmond required for his liberation.Footnote 95

The confined or bound figure was a common theme within radical discourse and popular culture with a genealogy that reached back at least to the mid-seventeenth century. Accounts of the remarkable feats of the jail breaker Jack Sheppard, for example, enjoyed immense popularity following his execution in 1724. The revival of Sheppard's fame in the street literature and penny gaffs of Victorian England coincided with the peak of early Chartist activity.Footnote 96 Frost was familiar with all this, his father having entertained him with escape stories when he was a boy, and the dialectic of confinement and freedom was woven in to all his fictional work; the eponymous heroes and heroines of his novels break out of prison in the most ingenious ways time and time again.Footnote 97

I would suggest that after mid-century it became increasingly difficult for Frost to sustain the dream of absolute freedom and escape contained within these narratives; he recognized that more sophisticated strategies were needed to cope with the exigencies of day-to-day life and that the image of the escapologist was both appealing and immediately relevant; for the escapologist is only free conditionally before he or she is inevitably bound once again. Moreover, this is precisely an act or performance, done for the entertainment and amazement of an audience, and done for money. The parallels between the escapologist's art and the practice of working-class writers are striking; liminal individuals like Frost, Holyoake, and Brierley knew only too well that they were bound by editors, publishers, reviewers, and readers but used a variety of strategies, including tact, politeness, or native wit and humor, to slip the knots whenever possible. Their social and economic position meant that they had to be duplicitous to some extent and, rather than search exclusively for ideological continuities or ruptures in their work at a textual level, we need to develop a fuller grasp of the varied concrete situations within which they functioned.Footnote 98 This is precisely what Frost urged, and in case we had missed the meaning of his predicament he made it quite explicit at the end of the story—he was as good at this art as Redmond—in other words, he was a professional. But though a skilful escapologist, sometimes even Frost could not escape. Performing the act on another occasion he was unable to free himself, because the man who had tied him up had placed a noose around his neck. “‘I learned that trick in Australia,’ observed the author of [his] discomfiture. ‘I tied up a black fellow like that in the bush; and he is there now.’”Footnote 99

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18 Frost, Recollections, 88–89. Among his grandmother's books (which Frost later inherited) were bound copies of the Spectator, Guardian, Adventurer, and Persian Letters, as well as an edition of the letters of the second Lord Lyttelton.

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48 This work was first published as a penny serial by Purkess. Frost's name appeared on the title page of the bound edition (probably the first time he had seen his name in print), and he thanked readers for their “most flattering” reception of the novel in the preface.

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73 On discursive constraints note also Epstein, Radical Expression, vii.

74 Frost did not prioritize the group over the individual self, which Gagnier, Regenia has argued was a distinctive feature of many nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies in Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford, 1991), 138–70Google Scholar.

75 One might also compare him to displaced “middle-class” writers and politicians like Henry Mayhew and Ernest Jones. Interestingly, Frost was employed to finish Jones's novel, The Lass and the Lady (1855), when the latter ran out of steam. Taylor, Miles's study, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, considers the literariness of Jones's political self.

76 Holyoake used his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1842 as a springboard for his career as a radical speaker and writer. See Grugel, Lee, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia, 1976), 26–28Google Scholar.

77 Holyoake to Mill, 26 December 1862, letter 1457, Mill to Holyoake, 29 December 1862, letter 1458, Holyoake Collection; Kent, Christopher, “The Whittington Club: A Bohemian Experiment in Middle-Class Social Reform,” Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (September 1974): 31–55Google Scholar.

78 Including John Bright, William Gladstone, and Herbert Spencer. See letters 2291, 2305, 2317, 2329, 2334, 2340, 2397, and 3092 in the Holyoake Collection.

79 Gurney, Peter, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996), 119Google Scholar.

80 Cited by Smith, F. B., Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97 (Manchester, 1973), 98Google Scholar.

81 Cooper to Holyoake, 10 November 1853, letter 606, Holyoake Collection. Cooper also accused Holyoake of being “fairly admitted into the respectable circle” by this time.

82 Joyce, Patrick, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 23–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Vicinus, Martha, The Ambiguities of Self-Help: The Lancashire Dialect Writer Edwin Waugh (Littleborough, 1984)Google Scholar; Beetham, “Healthy Reading: The Periodical Press in Late Victorian Manchester,” in Kidd and Roberts, eds., City, Class and Culture, 180–87.

84 Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 105–7. Brierley joined the Masons in 1865 (the initiation fee was £4 10s.) and remained an active lodge member all his life.

85 See the short story, “The Battle of Langley Heights,” in The Chronicles of Waverlow (Manchester, 1863), 35–50Google Scholar. In Home Memories and Recollections of a Life (Manchester, 1886), 24Google Scholar, Brierley observed that when the “great strike” broke out, “we found the English Statute Book confronted by mob law.”

86 Joyce, Visions of the People, 284–87, 297–99, and “The People's English: Language and Class in England, c. 1840–1920,” in Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy (Cambridge, 1991), 154–90Google Scholar.

87 Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 112.

88 Ibid., 114.

89 See Gurney, Peter, “George Jacob Holyoake: Socialism, Association, and Co-operation in Nineteenth-Century England,” in New Views of Co-operation, ed. Yeo, Stephen (London, 1988), 64–65Google Scholar.

90 Frost, Reminiscences, vi.

91 Linebaugh, Peter uses the term in a very different context in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991; London, 1993), 119–22, 151–52Google Scholar.

92 Clark, Anna, “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (January 1992): 62–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joyce, Visions of the People, 310–12, and Democratic Subjects, 176–90. A useful survey of the burgeoning literature on Victorian melodrama, which incorporated some of the tropes found in the earlier form, can be found in McWilliam, Rohan, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (Fall 2000): 57–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a good example of Frost's use of the picaresque, see Alice Leighton; or, the Murder at the Druids’ Stones (1857). Frost knew the work of Tobias Smollett, the most well-known picaresque novelist, intimately. See Frost, Recollections, 319–20.

93 Harrison, J. F. C., The Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present (London, 1984), 18Google Scholar.

94 Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier's Tale, 104–6.

95 Frost, Reminiscences, 164–65.

96 Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 7–41; Ellis, S. M., “Jack Sheppard in Literature and Drama,” in Jack Sheppard, ed. Bleackley, Horace (Edinburgh, 1933)Google Scholar. W. H. Ainsworth's version of the story, which was serialized from January 1839, sparked off the craze that led some middle-class observers to opine that “all the Chartists in the land are less dangerous than this nightmare of a book.” The experience of incarceration was real enough for many Londoners in the 1820s and 1830s, decades that witnessed an explosion in the prison population. See Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1978; London, 1989), 185–86Google Scholar; Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), 574–75Google Scholar.

97 Frost, Reminiscences, 20, Emma Mayfield, 56, Paul the Poacher, 64–65 (a direct crib of one of Sheppard's most famous escapes), Obi; or, Three Fingered Jack (1851), 9–10, and Alice Leighton, 36–39.

98 All three sometimes wrote different things for different audiences or markets. Alternative readings of Holyoake, for example, can be found in Tholfsen, Trygve, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976), 264Google Scholar; Joyce, Visions of the People, 52; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 141, 380; Gurney, Co-operative Culture, 114–25. Brierley's continuing radicalism is stressed by Taylor, Anthony, “Reynolds Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy and the Radical Anti-Jubilee: Britain's Anti-Monarchist Tradition Reconsidered,” Historical Research 68, 167 (October 1995): 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, 103.

99 Frost, Circus Life, 173.