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Review.
In my biographical sketch of the Victorian poet Gerald Massey (1828-1907) in volume 2 of the
Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals since 1770 (1984), I noted the lack of a complete and objective study of Massey and his work. David Shaw has now remedied the deficiency in this perceptive and detailed biography. It certainly replaces previous studies of Massey by B.O. Flower (1895), Sidney Lee in the
Dictionary of National Biography, 1901-1911 (1912), Buckner Trawick's unpublished PhD. Dissertation (Harvard 1942) and my brief essay on Massey as a Victorian Radical and nonconformist.
…This excellent biographical study is augmented by copious informative endnotes, three pertinent appendices (which include an interesting analysis of Massey's personality), chronological lists of Massey's many publications, a bibliography of published sources pertaining to the life and career of Massey (to which might be added Ulrike Schwab's
The Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study, Dordrecht, 1993), some interesting photographs and a very useful index. David Shaw's achievement will undoubtedly long stand as the best work on this very interesting Victorian poet and freethinker. J. O. Baylen, Professor Emeritus.
English Literature in Transition 1880-1920,
vol. 40, no.1, 1997, 118-121. Tempe, Arizona.
Review.
This is a volume of exceptional interest about a man of letters and Spiritualist pioneer now largely forgotten…
David Shaw's biography is impressively researched and thoroughly annotated. It is a book which will appeal to all those interested in the struggles of our Victorian Spiritualist pioneers and the literary and religious controversies of the period.
Gerald Massey is an unjustly neglected figure. David Shaw's well written and absorbing study succeeds
in doing justice to a man of immense intellectual curiosity, a gifted poet and able defender of Spiritualism. I hope it will be widely read.
Owen Doyle.
Two Worlds, Dec. 1996, 43-44.
A Historical Perspective.
From..."The Northern Star's Poetry Column, 1838-52."
"....The poetry column for 1849 attests to the increasingly diffuse nature
of both the Chartist movement and Chartist poetic production. The
column is heavily dependent on other Chartist and radical working-class
journals such as the Democratic Review,
The Reasoner, and in
particular the Uxbridge Spirit of Freedom, co-edited by the most
important, and in many ways the most remarkable, poet of late Chartism,
Gerald Massey."
Dr Michael Sanders,
Lecturer in English Literature, Lancaster University.
Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2006.
Judaeo-Christian Genesis:
The "Masseyan" View.
There is a continuing controversy among students of the past that is
usually posed as a dichotomy between a ‘diffusionist’ and an
‘anti-diffusionist’ view of history:
• The diffusionists posit that whenever a complex of similar or identical
cultural traits are shared between two widely-spaced groups of people, it
means that one group is the giver and the other the receiver of such
traits.
• The anti-diffusionists insist that different groups of human beings can
discover or arrive at identical customs, beliefs, and techniques
independently, without any intervening influence of one group upon the
other.
Clearly, there is abundant evidence in favor of the anti-diffusionist
opinion, but its validity and cogency recede to the nothingness when the
number of shared cultural traits accumulates past a certain point. Then,
only a diffusionist viewpoint can explain the phenomenon. In fact, it has
been postulated that if two cultural groups share at least 12 traits in
common, it is presumptive evidence of diffusional influence of one upon
the other. The more discernible shared traits there are beyond that
threshold, the more certain it is that diffusion is the explanation for
that commonality.
Gerald Massey was a diffusionist, plain and simple. For him the issue was
unarguable: the religious ideas and symbols whose genesis is in the Nile
Valley, flowed outward from Africa eventually giving birth to both Judaism
and Christianity. The number of parallels between those two religions on
the one hand and those of Nile Valley religion on the other, are simply
too abundant to admit of any other conclusion. The above-mentioned
threshold of correspondences that distinguishes a diffusionist explanation
from that of independent development, is so far surpassed in the
comparison of Judaeo-Christian and Nile Valley religions that the unbiased
observer, in Massey’s view, is compelled to admit that Judaeo-Christian
religion is the end-product of the Nile Valley world-system. The story of
Horus presages that of Moses; the epic of Osiris, the mummified and
anointed Kerest, prefigures that of Yahushua, the resurrected Christ. For
Massey it was a Nile Genesis and only through understanding the Nile
Genesis is the Judaeo-Christian epoch intelligible.
Charles Finch,
M.D.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
September, 2006
Gerald Massey and Chartism.
The Chartists’ sustained campaign between 1838 and 1858 across Britain for
the Six Points of the People’s Charter was the first mass political
movement by working people in modern history. The Chartists’ avowed
object was the creation of a democratic society based upon universal
suffrage, secret ballot, equal electoral districts, the removal of
property qualifications for parliamentary candidates, payment of MPs, and
annual parliaments. At a time of considerable industrial and social
change in the country, Chartism was more than just a narrowly defined
parliamentary reform movement. Under the leadership of Feargus
O’Connor MP and through the columns of his Northern Star newspaper, this
sophisticated mass movement mobilised a powerful opposition to the New
Poor Law Act of 1834 and the Rural Police Force Act five years later; it
also acted as vehicle for the agitation against excessive factory hours of
work and was an important voice in the debate on the reform of the
nation’s currency.
Chartism seriously troubled the Victorian authorities by its organisation
of mass meetings, conventions or anti-parliaments, fiery oratory, threats
and actual outbreaks of violence, particularly in 1839, 1842 and 1848.
Contemporaries were rightly alarmed too by the Chartists’ creation of an
alternative radical, political culture at the heart of which were their
own churches, schools, clubs and institutions, and one in which countless
men and women wrote their own hymns, protest poetry and prose to express
their hopes for social justice.
Branch activist at Uxbridge, Chartist internationalist, industrial
co-operator and radical journalist, Gerald Massey played a key role in the
creation of this rich and radical way of life. Coming to the
movement late he nevertheless made his mark nationally: in the Chartist
press and on the platform he became one of the movement’s most talented
and inspirational worker-poets and writers. Any serious study of the
Chartist legacy cannot fail to recognise the standing in which Gerald
Massey was held both within radical politics and late Victorian
literature.
Owen R. Ashton,
Emeritus Professor in Modern British Social History,
Staffordshire University. June 2007.
Minor Poets and
Political
Radicalism in the Victorian Literary Canon.
The
Victorian Age has long been better known for its novels than for its
poetry.
In 1861, George L. Craik observed that "in the Georgian Era, verse was in
the ascendant; in the Victorian era the supremacy has passed to prose."*
Indeed, prose continues to reign supreme in the scholarly field of
Victorian literature and on many Victorian literature syllabi at the
University level. This state of affairs is not surprising
considering that such major poets as Tennyson and Arnold repeatedly
expressed concerns that the lyric voice of poetry seemed ill-suited for an
audience shaped by the forces of industrialism, capitalism, and democratic
movements.
Such characterizations are, however, misleading and have effectively
silenced the powerful voices of a host of minor radical and working-class
poets. Gerald Massey, Thomas Hood, Thomas Cooper and their peers
made significant contributions to the social, political, and literary
movements of the nineteenth-century. The reader of their poems can
see that poetry was a force with which to be reckoned and served many
functions. It was printed on banners at political rallies, sung in
lieu of hymns at secularist ceremonies, and recognized as a powerful
weapon in the fight against the establishment. Although these poems
often spoke on behalf of the oppressed as a group, they also served as
vehicles for personal creativity and self-expression and as points of
entry into a burgeoning national literary culture. Read alongside
canonical works with which they are in dialogue, these poems have the
capacity to open up the canon and pose new questions about the nature and
function of the Victorian poetry. For example, Gerald Massey's "The
Cry of the Unemployed" resonates with Tennyson's "Mariana" and serves as both
tribute to and critique of Tennyson's lyric expression of depression and
misery.
There is no question that the inclusion of minor poets such as Massey
enriches the Victorian syllabus. However, the fact that most of these
poems are out-of-print has made it difficult for students to access a
representative and extensive selection of texts. Fortunately, students of
the literature of this period will have—as this website extends to
encompass the work of further minor poets—a growing opportunity to see for
themselves that the Victorian period was, indeed, an Age of Poetry.
*
Jackson
I. Cope, “An Early Analysis of ‘The Victorian Age in Literature,” Modern
Language Notes 71:1 (1956) 16.
Michelle Hawley
Associate Professor, Department of English,
California State University, U.S.A.
August, 2007.
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