Critical Humanist Thoughts on the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography –
‘Nobody wages war with Dostoevsky or Dickens’
Claire Lynch
Introduction
Academic disciplines are notoriously territorial. For all that interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary work is rightly lauded, traditional divisions stubbornly remain. Continued
dependence on this is partially excused as a matter of practicality, for this is a tried and tested
way to organise university departments, degree programmes, funding councils and
publishers. Alongside this pragmatism stands the more zealous claim, that diverse approaches
to studying the long-forgotten, the ill-understood and the not-yet-imagined are incompatible.
Both a rejection and a reflection of these assumed divisions can be seen in Plummer’s claim
that ‘Nobody wages war with Dostoevsky or Dickens,’ as part of his reclamation of the
‘humanities for the human sciences’ (Plummer 2001: 8, 7). He also links the previous neglect
of human document research in the social sciences to a misplaced disciplinary loyalty when
he claims that if unity of approach is to be found ‘it is with the humanities; literature and the
arts not science and the experiment’ (4). However, in lamenting this traditional bias towards
science, he risks seeing the humanities through a romanticised gaze. At the very least, the
claim that ‘Nobody wages war with Dostoevsky or Dickens’ or as he goes on, ‘Austen or
Auden’ (6), makes literary studies not a mode of interrogation but more a practice of
reverence.
That scholars treat texts differently due to disciplinary stances is unremarkable. While
this chapter re-considers Plummer’s ideas about the humanities, and specifically literary
methodologies, it is not a critique but rather a response to his call to maintain ‘selfconsciousness about method’ (Plummer 2001: 119). The Burnett Archive is a useful test case
since it is a collection of documents of life, which might also variously be described as
historical sources, literary works and autobiographical manuscripts. In re-evaluating how
texts might be read and researched, the literary scholar and the social scientist should share a
clear sense of what their various methodologies hope to achieve, while at the same time
acknowledging the great complexities involved in documents of life research.
Since literary studies is particularly dependent on the study of documents, Plummer
pays attention to writers and those who study them, arguing that their ‘mode of experiencing,
feeling, interpreting and writing sets no standards, provides no models, makes no sense to a
discipline that has always aspired to science’ (Plummer 2001: 8). This lack of sense
(nonsense?) might be read in two ways: freedom from the “oppression” of science or laxity
on the part of literary scholars. Are those who study literature perhaps too timid to rise up
against the poets and novelists who command them? Plummer clearly sees value in the
humanities approach to document-based research, expressing a ‘longing for social science to
take more seriously its humanistic foundations and to foster styles of thinking that encourage
the creative, interpretative story telling of lives’ (Plummer 2001:1). This admiration for the
shared foundations of liberal humanism, however, fails to register the disciplinary history of
literary studies regarding the impact of (post)structuralism and practical criticism, approaches
quite distinct from this perception of it. It is significant that the same claim is made in both
editions of Plummer’s landmark text. In 2001 as in 1983, ‘nobody’ dared to look Dickens in
the eye. In both editions, the statement seems to no longer be an observation but rather a
challenge to the disputatious social sciences, or perhaps to any with a taste for literary
warmongering.
The presumed disciplinary difference regarding documents of life and texts more
generally, as well as the potential for re-reading documents from a new perspective, was
something I had grown familiar with in my own research regarding the Burnett Archive of
Working Class Autobiography. In the following discussion I shall use Plummer’s ideas as a
framework to consider the original research project which established the archive and the
current project which aims to revitalise it. The Burnett Archive’s collection of documents of
life, once safe territory for social historians, has recently become the subject of, if not a
disciplinary war, then at least a recognisable literary invasion.
The Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography: A Test Case
Held at Brunel University in London, the Burnett Archive contains over 230 autobiographies
by working class authors who wrote in English and lived in England, Scotland or Wales
between 1790 and 1945. The compilers, John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall,
were highly attuned to the value of such documents of life, noting that:
In their different ways all working class autobiographers were building upon puritan assumptions
about the significance of the inner lives of ordinary men and women, and about the necessity of
understanding human identity in the dimension of time (Burnett et al 1984: xiii)
Prior to the establishment of the Archive, academic inattention to working class life
narratives had often been justified by a supposed lack of available sources. A research
project, of which the Archive was a by-product, sought to question the assumptions that
illiteracy prevented self-reflection, or that an unpublished narrative necessarily meant an
unpublishable one. By identifying previously unknown autobiographies, Burnett, Vincent and
Mayall were able to contribute to a change in perceptions of working class autobiographies,
in part because, as Harrison (1984: 16) wryly puts it, they had ‘deliberately gone out to look
for them.’
The original research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, gathered working
class autobiographical documents of life from local history libraries and record offices, ‘but
also extant private memoirs, many of which remained hidden in family attics, known only to
the author or a handful of relatives’ (Burnett et al 1984: xxix). Requests for autobiographies
were also made via the national press and, most successfully, BBC Woman’s Hour in 1978,
leading to 800 men and women contacting the project. The outputs from the research were
various and widespread, perhaps the principal of which is the annotated critical bibliography
The Autobiography of the Working Class (Burnett et al 1984), published in three large
volumes and widely considered to be an influential resource.
The limits of the original study are outlined in the introduction to Volume I of the
critical bibliography, including its use of the geographical boundaries of England, Scotland
and Wales (although, in fact, several other countries are mentioned in the context of
emigration, war and so on). The volumes are divided by date, so that in the first volume the
autobiographies refer to events which fall between 1790 and 1900, meaning that authors must
have been born before 1896. All texts are in the English language, excluding other native
languages of the British Isles. While the searches conducted were wide-reaching and
thorough, the editors acknowledge that problems of literary classification, such as that
biography and autobiography are merged under the same category heading in some local
libraries, may have impeded their work. Nevertheless the scale is still to be marvelled at, with
Volume I comprising the abstracts of 804 autobiographies and a further nine appendices.
As the editors also note, one of the most challenging aspects of the original project
was establishing definitions for the terms autobiography and working class. Indeed, in an
attempt to evade these problems, some texts which are considered to be not quite within these
slippery categories are included in the appendix. The editors in fact abide by approaches
traditionally thought to apply to the social sciences. Their focus is on the (social) subject, not
the (human) document, since they were primarily concerned with the text as evidence of the
author as a working class subject. The published research presents the resultant patterns,
trends and overviews, which can be taken as their overall findings. In delineating this as a
collection of working class lives, the editors are self-evidently interested in the nature of
work itself and can barely disguise their disappoint when they discover that:
Work, it seems, was not a central life-interest for the working classes. For most it was taken as
given, like life itself, to be endured rather than enjoyed; most were probably glad enough to have
it at all, and to expect to derive satisfaction or happiness from it was an irrelevant consideration
(Burnett 1974: 15)
Nevertheless, paid work continues to be the means by which these lives are classified.
They are indexed and arranged by British census employment categories, and in the series of
related publications they are classified by types of work and divided into chapters as
unskilled or skilled labourers, domestic or agricultural workers and so on. I was surprised to
find, when I first came to look at the Archive, that there seemed to be a rather important
category of work missing, that of writers. The omission suggests an ideological distinction. If
work and science are concepts of the “real world,” productivity and applicability, then
writing one’s own life is perhaps esoteric by comparison, self-indulgent even. The exception
emerges when such writing can be seen to contribute to the work of others. As the editors
acknowledge, writing is hard work, observing that:
Whether they were composing with a practiced hand or laboriously constructing sentences for the
first and last time in their lives, these autobiographers were asserting the right of the labouring
poor to make their own history (Burnett et al 1984: xvii)
Assertive as it may be, these working class writers, writing their “own history,”
seemingly must have their work organised and interpreted by historians before it is seen as
valuable. Writing, in this analysis, is understood as a social and not an artistic act, as the
production of valuable source material for historians but not it would seem works of
literature. Why is this writing classified as utilitarian rather than as artistic? Is there an
assumption that the author-subjects are incapable of literariness, or are such possibilities
overlooked by the researchers? The distinction again seems to be disciplinary; detail over
embellishment, people over characters, historical fact over literary fiction.
The first edition of Plummer’s (1983) Documents of Life was published just a year
before The Autobiography of the Working Class (Burnett et al 1984), while Plummer’s
(2001) second edition references Burnett et al’s work in the bibliography, listing it as
suggested reading in Chapter 4 on ‘The Auto/Biographical Society’ under the heading of
‘specific kinds of voices’ and on the topic of class. More significant than these crossreferences, however, is the way in which the work of Burnett, Vincent and Mayall directly
highlights some of Plummer’s concerns. Strikingly, Burnett et al note the impossibility of the
autobiographies conforming to the specifications of the social sciences, claiming that while
their work ‘may have transformed the known dimensions of this category of evidence,’ it will
regrettably ‘never be possible to approach the autobiographies as a statistically accurate
cross-section of all, or any part of the population’ (Burnett et al 1984: xix). Indeed, anxiety
over meeting disciplinary expectations appears to have dogged Burnett et al throughout the
project, elsewhere, for example, fearing that ‘in the bosom of the historian, doubts will arise’
when reading these narratives (Burnett et al 1984: xvii). Of course, such concerns about
accuracy, representation and objectivity are now routinely dispelled by autobiographical
theorists of a more literary bent. As Laura Marcus (1994: 3) puts it, ‘very few critics would
demand that autobiographical truth should be literally verifiable,’ due to the implicit
complexity of the ‘truth of the self.’ Yet even those who are at ease with the delinquency of
auto/biography may still be surprised by the contradictions which emerge as the editors
describe their work; at one moment strictly the preserve of the historian, the next a literary
orgy in which ‘Writer and reader, story-teller and historian, are bound together by a common
fascination with the detail of an unfolding life’ (Burnett et al 1984: xvii). A ‘common
fascination’ there may well be, but is there a common understanding of the way a life unfolds
in document form as story or history? Is this either or both? More to the point, need there be
such an understanding? It is clear from the systematic way in which these texts were
collected and anthologised that historical and social concerns were paramount. The plot of
the unfolding life was enticing to be sure, but the need to record and organise data in print
curtailed any creative re-telling of these stories. In fact it is precisely Plummer’s (2001: 9)
proposal that documents of life researchers should ‘side with the uniquely subjective’ and as
a consequence ‘dismantle the model of social science’ that Burnett et al. avoid in their study
of life stories.
Reconsidering
In the simplest sense, my research is a reconsideration of these documents of life which
began where Burnett et al had left off, that is, with the title. Whereas in the original research
project the focus was very clearly the working class aspect, I now began to re-consider the
role of autobiography as a mode of literary production. This occurred at two levels: firstly,
regarding the products of the earlier research, the published research works; and secondly,
concerning the autobiographical manuscripts which had provoked them. In this sense, the
autobiographies took on a dual identity as documents of life to be approached afresh but also
as off-shoots from a previous analysis. As Starn (2002: 388) has noted, an archive is both
‘temple of fact, objectivity and omniscience,’ and also ‘the factory of deceit, distortion, and
prejudice.’ Far from disturbing critics of autobiography, this ambiguity is sought out; as
Olney (1980: 4) puts it, ‘one always feels that there is a great and present danger that the
subject will slip away all together,’ because ‘there is no way to bring autobiography to heel as
a literary genre with its own proper form, terminology and observances.’ If archives purport
to be repositories of the ‘true records’ in some general sense, an archive of autobiography,
with ever-attendant questions about fictionalising in these, is in some sense the perfect setting
for documents of life research. By returning to the manuscripts within this framework, my
intention was to excavate not what a particular autobiography might tell about bricklaying or
train driving, as had previously been focused on by social historians, but rather, what it meant
to that individual to be a bricklayer or a train driver in the context of their own life. More
importantly still, my approach focused on the exact way in which the experience has been put
into words and represented. In the first edition of Documents of Life, it is proposed that the
‘modern biographer ... is as much of a researcher as a literary writer’ (Plummer 1983: 10),
thereby legitimising the fictive, linguistic and emotive by permitting a methodology which
focuses equally on the story and the history.
My justification for adopting a ‘literary’ approach is connected with Plummer’s query
whether ‘it goes too far to suggest that many of our earlier literary classics are versions of
ethnography and life story’ (Plummer 2001:10). If they are, then might it not equally be
possible that ethnographies, case studies, public records and so on are versions of neglected
literature? “Literariness” is not present only and solely by design, and although proposing
that all writing is in some sense literature is arguably more reductive than inclusive,
recognising the breadth of the term expands what are seen as possible and permissible
analytical approaches to documents of life. The term “document,” for instance, implies
something different from a book. A document is the current draft, loose leaf pages or
computer file, still editable but nonetheless significant. Literary archives, that is, those of
poets, novelists, playwrights and critics, often contain the documents which subsequently
become books: their notes, drafts, and letters. These are documents which are simultaneously
post- and pre- the literary product, written in its genesis but surviving after its publication.
Larkin’s (1983: 99) explanation of the magical and meaningful nature of archives trades on
this in his observation that the ‘magical value is the older and more universal: this is the
paper he wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this
particular miraculous combination.’ In other words, it is not simply the content, but the
nature of archives which matters; not just what is written, but the presence of the writing life,
hinted at in handwriting and fingerprints on faded notepaper. To ignore such qualities would
stifle both the magical and the meaningful and thereby diminish its content and overall value.
This is not to say that a document’s inclusion in an archive should be taken as evidence that it
is indeed meaningful or valuable. As Steedman (2001:68) sensibly notes, an archive is ‘made
from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also the mad
fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there.’ This
happenstance which characterises archival material is understandably alien to the scientist for
whom the need for “control” is vital. Nevertheless such material can not only be read as
literature but also inspire or even contribute to the creation of such.
Re-reading the original autobiographical manuscripts now in the Burnett Archive
alongside the critical bibliography, it is clear that the autobiographer’s literary endeavours are
necessarily undermined when reduced to coded indices and edited extracts. These
autobiographies are literary in at least the basic sense that they demonstrate the author’s
literacy and corresponding interest in literature:
Books had transformed their mental world, and now they wrote to transform the mental world of
others. Their engagements with literature had led many into mutual improvement societies and
other forms of collective working class activity, where ... they had gained the confidence required
to embark upon the enterprise of a full-length autobiography (Burnett et al 1984: xvi)
As any literary archive demonstrates, ‘confidence’ but also repetition and skill’ stand
behind good writing. In addition to all of the other types of work represented across the
archive, and the variety of jobs often recounted within single narratives, the authors of these
documents of life were also writers. Whatever else might be understood from their
autobiographies, hard work (physical and intellectual) is evident throughout. How then, is
such pragmatism to be understood by those engaged in what Plummer (2001:1) describes as
the ‘creative, interpretative story telling of lives’?
Understanding Interpretive Story-Telling
To consider these texts as literary documents is to acknowledge both the ‘magical’ and the
‘meaningful’ aspects of their production and preservation. This in turn provides the potential
to interpret the other texts which surround them. While Plummer argues for the certainties of
Dickens and Dostoyevsky, parody, pastiche, intertextual homage, influence and interpretation
are at the core of literary studies and the production of fiction. Likewise, each autobiography
held in the Burnett Archive has passed through a process of coding and editing, leading to the
production of a series of related documents of life, and as a result, a researcher can access
three versions of the same life at various points on Plummer’s (2001: 179) ‘Continuum of
Construction’: (i) the original autobiographical manuscript; (ii) the entry in the index to the
archive containing key biographical information; and (iii) the abstract based on a textual
formula in The Autobiography of the Working Class bibliography.
These three documents, or parallel versions, provide a challenge to a ‘creative,
interpretative’ methodology, since there is clearly a need to consider what has been added or
removed, lost or gained, during the process. Directly comparing documents in this way might
be considered the remit of genetic criticism, a methodology of particular relevance here since
it has been described as the ‘science of literature,’ although this is a depiction rejected by
Philippe Lejeune, who prefers ‘metaphors of detective investigation, archaeology, and
psychological novels’ (Deppman et al. 2004: 205). In the discussion which follows I hope to
show the relevance of the intertextual relationships which contribute to the creative process.
The existence of these three interrelated documents is testament to the
undocumented life of the Archive itself. Each word in the index, sentence in the abstracts, or
footnote in the bibliography, is self-evidently the work of a researcher, librarian, archivist or
administrator. Their work is materialised via the working lives of those autobiographies they
gather, reproduce and interpret. A deliberate focus on the literary aspects here not only draws
attention to the layers of narrative construction involved, but also opens the way for further
re-writing. This leads to the documents which might be considered the secret weapon in an
imagined war against ‘Dostoevsky and Dickens,’ that is, new fiction written in response to
the original documents of life, come into view. To demonstrate the relationships between
these interrelated documents of life, I will now focus on one text in the Burnett Archive, the
documents of life of Mr. H.J. Harris.
As is customary, the index to the Archive provides the key bibliographical details of
each autobiography, which in this case are also the key biographical details of the author.
Since the index is frequently the first point of contact a researcher has with the Archive, what
the entry does and does not say is clearly significant. Harris’s life and life documents are
outlined in the index as follows:
Harris, H.J.: Autobiographical letters, 1978-1984 (c. 5,000 words): 2:363. b. 1903. Birmingham;
Worcester. Orphanage life 1906-1917, life as tramp, experiences in lunatic asylums in 1930s.
Clearly, the index entry must be concise and include facts such as dates and locations,
but nevertheless editorial or one might even say authorial decisions have been made about
what to include in order to best encapsulate the content of the texts involved. This document
undoubtedly impacts on the researcher’s approach to the full narrative, perhaps even
influencing his/her decision to access a full manuscript. Evidently, then, the index is not a
neutral document but prioritises, censors and shapes potential interpretations.
Just as with the index to the Archive, abstracts in The Autobiography of the Working
Class are structured via a formula with a paragraph on each of: (i) Bibliographical
Information; (ii) Family Life, (iii) Occupations; (iv) Activities; (v) Comments. Notably,
writing does not fall under ‘occupations’ but rather ‘activities’ in the editors’ taxonomy.
However, in the ‘comments’ section, literary judgements are made about the style and quality
of writing and as the editors explain:
The abstracts are designed to present the contents of every autobiography in a form which is both
concise and readable. Each provides a survey of the autobiography as a literary text and a
summary of the life it describes (Burnett et al 1984: xxxiii)
The abstracts were based on a full reading of the original manuscripts, with some
additional material provided from sources such as the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography or obituaries where available, although the editors claim that ‘essentially the
autobiographers themselves are responsible for the content of their entries’ (Burnett et al
1984: xxxiv). The abstracts as documents, it is implied, have been somehow harvested or
translated from the original documents of life. In the H.J. Harris example, the
autobiographer’s occupations, a category defined by the editors as the ‘Sequence of
occupations over lifetime, with dates where given,’ have been listed as:
Imprisoned for theft; committed to mental hospital on several occasions; joined the Territorial
Army in 1938.
By even the most encompassing definition, imprisonment and severe mental illness
are not ‘occupations.’ Rather, they seem to be key events and circumstances which are
understandably seen as significant by both the author and also the compiler of the abstract.
The comments paragraph, designed to record a ‘Summary of character of autobiography’ and
a ‘Brief indication of the principal areas of interest and the quality of the writing,’ describes
Harris’s work somewhat differently as:
A remarkable story of orphanage life ... recalling the lack of variety and the imposition of daily
routines and chores, forms of punishment ... Harris also writes of his life after release, describing
his unpreparedness for the outside world, interpreting language literally and so causing many
misunderstandings and some to doubt his sanity. Some mention is also made of his life as a tramp
and comparisons between the orphanage and his experiences in lunatic asylums in the 1930s.
The value-laden description of this text as ‘remarkable’ as well as a wider admiration
for the implicit literariness of the ‘story’ told suggests a rather different narrative from that
hinted at by the bare details of the index. In compiling the abstracts the editors were,
unsurprisingly, focused on categorising ‘the information in a form which will facilitate access
to the texts by readers in search of information or specific subjects’ (Burnett et al 1984:
xxxiv). In doing so, they made rather large assumptions about the type of ‘information’ and
‘specific subjects’ that would interest future readers.
The original manuscripts of H.J. Harris’s autobiographical letters are highly stylised,
extremely detailed and written by a man clearly eager to be read. Of most significance here,
however, is the literariness of these letters, not just in form but also in intertextual selfawareness. In his first letter to David Mayall, Harris writes:
I think it necessary that, with the Dickensian view people have, a truer picture is made. For
instance, young Oliver would not have taken his basin and asked for more. To use a slang word of
my times, he wouldn’t have had the mallom, (mening, [sic] he wouldn’t have had the pluck plus
occasion opportunity) ... all meals were taken in ABSOLUTE silence. Dare anyone make the least
sound, during meals. (17 October 1983)
Harris’s account of life in an orphanage might not be an act of war against Dickens,
but it certainly reads like fighting words. In his autobiographical portrait he not only
compares himself to Dicken’s famous fictional orphan Oliver Twist, but attempts to provide
an alternative narrative in his own writing. In this re-writing of Dickens, Harris conflates his
desire to write the truth about his life with the idea that all written documents must in some
sense be true. In doing so, he does not embrace the role of fiction to contradict expectations.
Dickens, in contrast, describes how:
Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last
they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that ... lots were cast [as to] who should walk up to
the master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist. ... Child as he
was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and
advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:
'Please, sir, I want some more.’ (Dickens 2003 [1867]: 39)
Oliver Twist does have the mallom, but that is because he is a fictional character and
Dickens’ plot depends upon it. In addition to emphasising the difference between his life and
fiction, Harris is also keen to be distinguished from literary writers. Harris instructs Mayall:
‘If you make use of any particular in my letters please write it in your own style. I’m no
author, or I’d have written a book long ago’ (30 January 1984).
From 2010 on, students on the Brunel MA in Creative and Professional Writing
course have been invited to engage with the Burnett Archive as part of their assessed work.
The outputs have taken various forms, including short story collections, poetry, word art and
historical fiction. Alongside their creative outputs, the students have produced commentary
pieces and seminars were held to discuss the ethical implications of the project, for example,
the potential ethical unease of re-writing a personal narrative, and the complexity of the
informed consent and copyright attached to the documents. Students were asked to reflect on
why they had selected particular texts to work with, and how they had enjoyed or struggled
with the process of working with an autobiographical text and archive. For some students, the
activity has been seen as a process of writing themselves into the narratives through the
process of selection, but also for many it was seen as a way of engaging with their own sense
of working class identity.
Barbara Fisher’s (2011) unpublished short story ‘Never Had the Mallom’ was
inspired by the autobiographical letters of H.J Harris. Explaining her choice in the
introduction to her story, she writes that Harris:
Lived in an orphanage in Bristol from 1906 and then moved to Birmingham, my home town,
which sparked my interest. A drifter, but he always longed for more. Thankfully, he did not meet
the same end as my character. Mr Harris ended his days on social security in Worcester with a
wife and daughter. His use of the slang word ‘Mallom’ triggered my short story. (Fisher 2011: 1)
The author of the short story is keen to emphasise the autobiographical links between
herself and the subject, but also to distinguish between the subject of the autobiography and
the protagonist of the story. Taking inspiration from that word which distinguishes the real
from the fictional orphan, Fisher re-writes the rejection of Dickens in her story as follows:
Young Twist was an orphan, like me, wasn’t he? It made me laugh when Dickens wrote that
Oliver took his bowl and asked for more. He wouldn’t have had the mallom to do that. At
mealtimes we ate in silence. No-one ever asked for more. (Fisher 2011: 3)
Lives, Words and Life Documents
The layers of documents of life which comprise the Burnett Archive acknowledge the
fundamental connection between the life and the written word. The autobiographies, indices,
abstracts and stories are not associated with life because of what they refer to on each page,
but rather, because of the ‘lived life’ that is behind and within them. Plummer’s (2001: 8)
claim that ‘nobody wages war with Dickens and Dostoevsky’ is both provocative and
enlightening. The implication that the literary researcher is quiescent before his or her
canonical sources provokes a response. This need not be limited to deconstruction but may
also include creation, the writing of new narratives as well as analysis of old, with both
having been commented on here. Similarly, Plummer’s choice of canonical patriarchs and the
presumed hierarchy which they reinforce can be questioned through a focus on “writing from
below.” Thus in my research, the work of unpublished working class autobiographers and
creative writing students has been read alongside the work of established, professional
authors and historians in order to establish points of synchronicity across their various
documents. In all of the elements in this reconsideration the connection is found not in the
document itself but in its production. It is through the act of writing (document-making) that
both the ‘magical’ and the ‘meaningful’ is sustained. In the case of the working class
autobiographers whose writings have led to the Burnett Archive’s existence, the purpose is
found in the process not the product:
Although few earned their livings wholly from literary pursuits, often supporting their families by
menial labour, writing was for them the activity which gave meaning and purpose to life (Burnett
et al. 1984: xxv).
This link between the act of writing and the application of “meaning and purpose”
may indeed be taken as relevant to the study of documents of life more broadly. Equally, the
research described above on the Burnett Archive is applicable in other contexts in three key
ways. In the first instance, the re-evaluation of findings from a completed research project
highlights the importance of returning to previously analysed documents of life. The first
reading of a document of life need not be the definitive one. Secondly, the approach outlined
here indicates the benefit of applying methodologies and perspectives from correlated
disciplines. A literary reading does not replace a sociological or historical one but it does
contribute to a richer interpretation of the documents in question. Finally, I have indicated
above that innovation and creativity expands the potential of documents of life. While
traditional research methodologies may limit us to being cautiously reverential (thereby
understanding too little) or recklessly high-handed (thereby assuming too much), creative
research methods stand alongside the original documents. In other words, working with
documents of life in a way which leads to interrogation, adaptation and interpretation
provides us with pertinent re-readings through the very process of re-writing.
Appendix: The Research Project This Chapter Is Based On
The Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography contains over 230 unpublished
autobiographies, understood by the original compilers of the Archive to be evidence of the
fact that ‘in different ways and in different contexts the common people had always been
historians of their own lives’ (Burnett, Vincent and Mayall 1984: xiii). These autobiographies
are rich documents of life. My research examines this writing and re-writing of lives as a
process which is simultaneously historical, sociological and literary. Much previous research
on the Burnett Archive has been concerned with reducing the written texts to an essence of
dates and facts, while my approach deploys methods more commonly found in the
humanities, and by so doing reintroduces more literary modes of ‘experiencing, feeling,
interpreting’ (Plummer 2001: 6).
•
The research outlined here is in two parts; a deconstruction through close reading and
a re-construction through creative writing. Both are linked by interests into the
meaning and use of documents pertaining to life and lives.
•
Part one is a close reading of a selection of texts from the archive’s twentieth century
collection in which the authors express self-consciousness about the act of writing. A
comparative close reading is applied in order to correlate reflections on the position of
the author, the nature of the text and the purpose of autobiography. The theoretical
framework is drawn from concepts of authorship and readership (Barthes),
intertextuality (Kristeva) and interdisciplinarity.
•
The research stands on the premise that while a life story may be read as indicative of,
or relevant to, the experience of a group, it is not universally applicable since there is
no universal subject.
•
Similarly, the autobiographer’s sense of what constitutes an autobiography, what can
and cannot be made public through a written narrative, whether they thought the text
was to be used for research or other purposes, will all have impacted upon the final
work.
•
The second part of the project described here is the establishment of postgraduate
creative writing workshops in which students institute their own selection criteria
based on their own research questions. These may include the author’s age, gender,
occupation, place of origin, or indeed the lack of influential markers, for example, the
numerous untitled and anonymous works in the Archive. Following investigation and
exploration of the autobiographies students produce creative projects in the form of
short fiction, drama, poetry or other innovative formats.
Useful Further Reading
The combination of photographic essay and philosophical treatise in Alan De Botton’s (2009)
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work permits the reader to reflect on the nature of work and its
claim ‘to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning’
(30).
Rose’s (2010) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes provides an extensive and
vibrant study of the literary history of the British working class, taking the Burnett et al
(1984) bibliography as an essential source.
Carolyn Steedman’s (2001) Dust is a remarkable study on the power and limitations of the
archive which requires the researcher to reconsider his/her dependence on documents.
References
Burnett, J. 1974. The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People
1820–1920 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Burnett, J., Vincent, D. and Mayall, D. 1984. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An
Annotated Critical Bibliography (1790-1900). Vol. I. Brighton: Harvester Press.
De Botton, A. 2009. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. London: Penguin.
Fisher, B. 2011. "Never had the mallom". Unpublished MA Thesis. UK: Brunel University.
Harris, H.J.: Autobiographical Letters, MS. 1978-1984 (c. 5,000 words): 2:363. The Burnett
Archive of Working Class Autobiography © Brunel University.
Harrison, J.F.C. 1984. The Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the
Present. London: Flamingo.
Larkin, P. 1983. A neglected responsibility: Contemporary literary manuscripts, in Required
Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, edited by P Larkin. London: Faber & Faber, 98108.
Lejeune, P. 2004. Auto:genesis: Genetic studies of autobiographical texts, in Genetic
Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texte, edited by J. Deppman, D. Ferrer, and M. Groden.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 193-217.
Marcus, L. 1994. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Olney, J. 1980. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Plummer, K. 1983. Documents of Life: An Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a
Humanistic Method. London: Allen & Unwin.
Plummer, K. 2001. Documents of Life 2 : An Invitation to A Critical Humanism. 2nd edition.
London: Sage.
Rose, J. 2010. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. 2nd Edition. London:
Yale University Press.
Starn, R. 2002. Truths in the archives. Common Knowledge, 8 (2), 387-401.
Steedman, C. 2001. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.