Talk:List of 18th-century British working-class writers

Requested move 27 August 2022

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved to List of 18th-century British working-class writers as the name with most consensus of discussion participants, plus WP:CONCISE and WP:PRECISE. (closed by non-admin page mover) — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 10:54, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

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List of 18th-century labouring-class writers (England, Wales, and Great Britain) → List of 18th-century working class writers (Great Britain) – Working class is more WP:COMMONNAME for that. Also the current title is geopolitically incorrect as England and Wales are part of Great Britain. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 09:53, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

• Comment why not change the disambiguator to "in Great Britain"? Wouldn't it be a more natural phrasing? — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 20:28, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
• Comment – I would guess that the rationale for the existing title is that working class has multiple meanings. In the Marxian understanding of the term, for instance, working class encompasses wage workers who don't own the means of production. This would include parts of what some others have called the professional–managerial class, parts of which I suspect are intended to fall outside the scope of this list. I'm not prepared right now to offer judgement as to which term is more suitable here, but I'll try to give it some more thought. The C of E, have you reviewed the historical literature on the subject to see if there is a historiographical consensus around using one or the other term with respect to 18th-century Britain?

If we are to use the term working class as proposed, however, it would need to be hyphenated as it's being used as a prepositive compound modifier (see MOS:HYPHEN). I would also agree with Mellohi! that the use of a parenthetical disambiguator isn't appropriate given that there isn't (to my knowledge) another article from which we're disambiguating and that natural disambiguation can be done very easily here. The C of E, provided we're sticking with working class, would you be open to amending your proposal to List of 18th-century British working-class writers? Graham (talk) 06:18, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I'd be happy to change it to that @Graham:. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 06:23, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

• Hello! Thanks for this fruitful discussion! I have no objection to using "working-class" rather than "labouring-class," though the latter term would have been more familiar in the 18th century. But, if anyone decides to start a companion list for the 19th century, "working-class" would probably be a better term to use.

As for the political geography, that is complicated. There are three/four other lists that use the same phrasing used for this article:

• List of early-modern women novelists (England, Wales, and Great Britain)
• List of early-modern women playwrights (England, Wales, and Great Britain) (twin of next list; mid-term goal is to make one table to replace the two articles)
• Chronology of early-modern women playwrights (England, Wales, and Great Britain) (twin of previous list; mid-term goal is to make one table to replace the two articles)
• List of early-modern women poets (England, Wales, and Great Britain)

The older lists of the group, the poetry and drama lists, originally used "UK," then each was edited by Moonraker on July 18, 2021 with the rationale that there was no UK until 1801 (from article histories: poetry; drama). The novels list was created 25 May 2022 and followed the newer phrasing.

On 10 June, 2022, Ireland was added to the descriptions of each of the lists with the rationale that "it was under jurisdiction of Great Britain for most of the time period being considered."

So here is my contribution to this discussion: I think these lists need to be consistent and if this one is changed, I will undertake to change the others. Arguments in favour of the change: familiarity for Wiki users. Arguments against: the term "UK" is ahistorical in this context. I admit that I have not searched too hard to see if there is any policy anywhere that might provide guidance; I accepted what seemed to be the reasonable rationale of the editor on July 18, 2021 and adopted that policy subsequently. — scribblingwoman 18:02, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Scribblingwoman: I have no objection to using "working-class" rather than "labouring-class," though the latter term would have been more familiar in the 18th century. But, if anyone decides to start a companion list for the 19th century, "working-class" would probably be a better term to use. In your view, might the term labouring-class be less ambiguous than working-class when discussing 18th-century Britain (given the polysemy of the latter term, as I discussed above)? And do we have any sense of what term is typically used in the historical literature? (Are historians fairly divided?)

On 10 June, 2022, Ireland was added to the descriptions of each of the lists with the rationale that "it was under jurisdiction of Great Britain for most of the time period being considered." If the article is moved to "List of 18th-century British X-class writers", I think this would exclude the Irish writers. While the 18th-century kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland were in personal union, the British parliament successfully resisted merging them outright. And (correct me if I'm wrong, but) Irish national identity was conceived of as very much distinct from that of the British. So I guess my question is: Are we okay with separating out the Irish writers? My inclination is yes, but I could be convinced otherwise if a significant chunk of the Irish writers on the list have a national identity that straddles Britain and Ireland and would need to be included on both the British list and a theoretical Irish list. Also pinging Moonraker and The C of E. Graham (talk) 20:32, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Re. "working" or "labouring" class: as far as they were concerned, they were likely labouring-class, but the post-Marxist me thinks of them as working class. So the question is, whose perspective ought to be reflected in the title, the subjects' or the readers'? The same question will also have an impact on the UK/British/etc. issue: are we defining the subjects as they might have defined themselves, or as we now would define them, retroactively?

Re. Irish writers: my preference would be to include them. In terms of this specific list, many of the writers on it were of interest to middle-class English readers specifically for their regional identity or nationality. This likely isn't the place for Welsh and Gaelic-language writers, but Welsh, Irish, and Scottish writers who worked in English should probably be here. This was the period when working-class writing became seen as an phenomenon worthy of notice, however patronizing that recognition initially was, and regionalism and nationality were inextricably tied up with how these writers were categorized and promoted. All that being said, I have no expertise in Irish literature and it could very well be that I am assuming that Irish writers were subject to the same dynamics as Scottish, Welsh, or rural English ones, and perhaps they more often were not. Certainly there are fewer on the list. — scribblingwoman 21:17, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

• Comment:: Scribblingwoman, once you get back into the 18th century, “United Kingdom” is worse than meaningless; at least throughout the 19th century it meant the whole of Great Britain and the whole of Ireland. “(England, Wales, and Great Britain)” is indeed an absurdity. “List of 18th-century British working-class writers” is fine by me. Moonraker (talk) 18:56, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks for your swift response! List of 18th-century British working-class writers sounds good to me too. — scribblingwoman 21:13, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

  Fine with me too! — Preceding unsigned comment added by The C of E (talk • contribs) 06:49, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  Graham11 does have a point, there is an argument that “British writers” refers to those who were British subjects, which included the Irish, and indeed the people of the Thirteen Colonies, British North America, the British West Indies, and so on! But we have a lot of categories that use “British” to mean “of Great Britain”, and confusion can be avoided by having a line at the top of the category to say what it includes. We might perhaps say “working-class writers of the Kingdom of Great Britain”. Moonraker (talk) 22:30, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  You bring up a good point! In the past, literary studies routinely drew a clear line between Europe and North America, but in earlier times, many of those writers would have had more complicated identities. I am still inclining towards List of 18th-century British working-class writers; Kingdom of Great Britain might raise even more questions. — scribblingwoman 19:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• Support, while scope is as it is. Johnbod (talk) 03:30, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.