Past and Present in the Folk Fiction of Thomas Cooper

abstract: This paper examines different uses of old-fashioned folk characters in radical and reformist fiction from the 1840s. Focusing on Thomas Cooper's Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1845), it argues that Cooper revised the folk figure to articulate radicalism. Cooper's folk figures contrast the middle-class reformer's counterpart in that the former are a disappearing breed representing quaint values, thus underlining a shift towards a working-class political consciousness and the need for a new critique of industrial-era corruption. Folk nostalgia was more than a means to critique industrialism, capitalism, or the factory. This analysis offers a new approach to the study of interclass relations by demonstrating the felt need for an alternative political vocabulary for working people under industrialism, capitalism, and the factory. By reading radical folk stories in the context of aesthetically elevated Chartist poetry, this analysis complicates the ways Chartist poetry has been said to aspire to middle-class tastes.