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Dr Oskar Cox-Jensen (University of Newcastle): Life-Writing, Street-Surviving 

In the wake of the twin catalysts of the Napoleonic Wars and Dissenting Christianity, working-class life-writing exploded as a form of nineteenth-century literature. The commodification of bottom-up lived experience extended beyond the traditional market in prose, bound between hard covers: it became a distinctive feature even of the London streets that individuals might make ends meet by peddling their own narratives, in pamphlets, placards, songs, and stories. This session focuses upon three instances in which marginalised individuals sought to turn suffering into profit as a means of surviving the streets. 1814: David Love, a Scottish itinerant hounded by parish officers, sells his 'Humble Petition'. The mid-1850s: Edward Albert, a disabled Black ex-seacook, publishes his prose-and-song life story. 1857: emboldened by the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, two mixed-race teenage girls tell their tale of escape from slavery. Together, these works and their reception have much to tell us of the character of nineteenth-century London, and its literary possibilities.


Oskar Jensen is NUAcT Fellow in Music at Newcastle University. His most recent book is Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (Duckworth, 2022). See https://oskarjensen.co.uk/ for more information.


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