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Labouring-Class Poets Online

‘Labouring Class Poets Online’ (LCPO) is an extended electronic resource offering information and opportunities for scholarly and general discussion about labouring-class poetry, especially but not exclusively from 1700-1900. Its origins lie in the ‘Database of Labouring-class Poets’ (DLCP) devised, compiled, edited and principally written by Goodridge with the help of the international group of scholars who produced under his general editorship the English Labouring-class Poets anthologies (2003-6). In 2001 DLCP contained 660 individual name entries; 600 more were added by the beginning of 2008; over 80 per cent of these entries, at each stage, were written by Goodridge. In twelve years DLCP re-mapped the entire field of its two-century span, changing perceptions from a small number of isolated individual poets, to a major and populous ‘recovered’ literary movement. DLCP thus appropriately formed the informational and intellectual core of LCPO. In 2013 Goodridge convened an international academic advisory group, and a working group of scholars from NTU, Creighton and Notre Dame, to launch LCPO, of which Goodridge remains general editor and principal writer. Bridget Keegan at Creighton is its eighteenth-century editor. LCPO offers the means for scholars to ‘blog’ and discuss topics of interest around the subject, so far used by postgraduate scholars such as Katie Osborne at Notre Dame and Dawn Whatman at NTU. Osborne and others added material such as manuscript reference sources, while Whatman, supervised and edited by Goodridge, has added entries for neglected Romantic-period and Nottingham-based women writers. A ‘John Clare Resource Page’, assembled, edited and almost all written by Goodridge has now been added to LCPO. This includes Goodridge’s annual indexes of Clare studies (1970-) and of the Clare Journal (1981-), and a first line index of Clare’s 3,500 poems. About a quarter of these materials were written in the REF period.