Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One The sorrows of Edwin Waugh: a study in ‘working-class’ identity
- 1 Young Edwin
- 2 The struggle for the moral life
- 3 The ends of the moral life
- 4 The cult of the heart
- 5 ‘God bless these poor folks’
- 6 The legacy of Edwin Waugh
- Part Two John Bright and the English people: a study in ‘middle-class’ identity
- Part Three Democratic romances: narrative as collective identity in nineteenth-century England
- Appendices
- Index
1 - Young Edwin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One The sorrows of Edwin Waugh: a study in ‘working-class’ identity
- 1 Young Edwin
- 2 The struggle for the moral life
- 3 The ends of the moral life
- 4 The cult of the heart
- 5 ‘God bless these poor folks’
- 6 The legacy of Edwin Waugh
- Part Two John Bright and the English people: a study in ‘middle-class’ identity
- Part Three Democratic romances: narrative as collective identity in nineteenth-century England
- Appendices
- Index
Summary
Waugh's great-grandfather was one of the condition of men known as ‘statesmen’, farmers working their own smallholdings in the far northern uplands of England. Long after his great-grandfather's day these economic ‘independents’ retained a reputation for mental independence and cultural distinctiveness: as late as the 1860s, after the period of Waugh's diary, parliamentary education commissioners noted their long-established traditions of literacy and book ownership and their retention of a strong local dialect. The Waughs farmed near Haltwhistle, just inside the Northumberland border. Waugh's grandfather was apprenticed as a shoemaker and leather dealer. He married into the Grindrod family of Rochdale, and set up as a leather dealer. How he came to Rochdale is unknown. But he was clearly a man of some substance, building several houses. He had ten children, seven sons and three daughters. The youngest of the seven sons was Edward, Edwin's father.
Edward was a shoemaker in Rochdale. Little is known of him, but that he was extremely poor and that he received a charity education in the local grammar school. This ‘poor man’ married into the Howarths, a family that came from the area between Bury and Rochdale, in Lancashire. Edwin Waugh's family on his mother's side were both Methodist and musical: one relative was a preacher for Wesley, and his mother told of the visit of Wesley to their home when she was young.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Democratic SubjectsThe Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England, pp. 31 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994