List of 18th-century British working-class writers

Title page of Mary Collier The Woman's Labour 1739
Title page of Mary Collier's The Woman's Labour: an Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck (London, 1739) (Google Books)

This list focuses on published authors whose working-class status or background was part of their literary reputation. These were, in the main, writers without access to formal education, so they were either autodidacts or had mentors or patrons. This lack of standardized education gave rise to the notion of the "rough," "untutored," "natural" artist. There was a vogue among middle- and upper-class readers, particularly later in the eighteenth-century and throughout the Romantic era, for writers with an "interesting story of genius-in-rags,"[1] for "the Unschooled Sons" — and daughters — "of Genius."[2]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Three was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Williams, John. "Displacing Romanticism: Anna Seward, Joseph Weston and the Unschooled Sons of Genius." Placing and Displacing Romanticism. Ed. Peter J. Kitson. London: Ashgate, 2001, 48-59.