Writing Lives Writing Lives
Collaborative Research Project on Working-Class Autobiography
Show Navigation Hide Navigation
  • About
    • Writing Lives
  • Authors
  • Authors Index
  • Themes
    • Introducing Our Autobiographers
    • Biographical Entries
    • Purpose & Audience
    • Home & Family
    • Education and Schooling
    • Reading & Writing
    • Habits, Culture & Belief
    • Life & Labour
    • Politics, Protest & Class
    • Fun and Festivities
    • Illness, Health and Disability
    • Migration, Immigration and Emigration
    • Life Writing, Class & Identity
  • News & Events
  • Archive of Working-Class Writing
  • Bibliographies
    • Conceptualising Class
    • Education
    • Family, Gender & Childhood
    • Leisure & Recreation
    • Life Writing
    • Poetry
    • Politics & Protest
    • Reading & Autodidacts
    • Social Histories of Class
    • War, Memory and Life Writing
    • Work
  • Links & Resources
  • Guest Blogs
  • Contact Us
  • Researching Writing Lives

Writing Lives Survey

Helen Rogers June 12, 2015 News & Events

Writing Lives is a collaborative research project on ‘The Autobiography of the Working Class in Britain, 1600 to Present’. We aim to create a website for memoirs written by ordinary people in Britain since 1600 and to provide a platform for new life writing. By making personal histories available to all we hope to encourage imaginative explorations of our collective past and to conduct new research on the themes, genre and authorship of working-class life writing. The project will invite participation from researchers and students, family and community historians, and the creative, heritage and education sectors.

Writing Lives is led by Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores University) and Claire Lynch (Brunel University) in collaboration with David Vincent, David Mayall and John Herson. To help us make a strong case for the public and scholarly value of the online resource, we invite you to answer this survey about how you, your students, or members of your organization might use it. We have already moved back our start date to 1600 following feedback from respondents to the survey so this is an opportunity to help shape this project and resource.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/writinglives

The Autobiography of the Working Class, 1790-1945 (3 vols. ed. by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, 1984-9)
The Autobiography of the Working Class, 1790-1945 (3 vols. ed. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, 1984-9)

The project will create a searchable database using all the entries in The Autobiography of the Working Class, 1790-1945 (3 vols. ed. by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, 1984-9). This bibliography summarizes nearly 2,000 memoirs outlining each author’s family and residences, education, occupations, religious and political affiliations, cultural interests and the memoir’s content and tone. The project will expand this data to include all titles written after 1700. Users will be able to do simple and complex searches and find links to holding libraries and digital copies.

Working-class writers have usually struggled to get their words into print. Those who published life-stories often did so through organizations like the Methodist societies, trade unions and co-operative movement. These published works have received the most attention and some are accessible via Google Books, the Internet Archive, and other digital collections. Yet, as Andrew Prescott shows, working-class memoirs have not been well-served by digitization and most are hidden in local studies archives. Working-class voices risk being obscured by the digital media just as they were by print.

We plan, therefore, to digitize unpublished and hard-to-access titles, beginning with the Burnett Collection of Working Class Autobiography at the Special Collections Library, Brunel University. This collection was the result of an appeal by John Burnett on Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ in the early 1980s which led to the discovery of over 800 titles, including 221 memoirs now held at Brunel. We also aim to digitize memoirs held by the Working Class Movement Library and hope future collaborations will make more collections available.

Writing Lives website

 

To create the online resource as a public platform we will integrate community engagement and crowd sourcing into its design and development. This will build on work by students at Liverpool John Moores University who share their research on the Burnett authors and memoirs at www.writinglives.org  and on twitter @Writing__Lives and Facebook. Already five families have discovered an ancestor wrote a memoir through this website.

Jack Goring (1861-1942) author of 'Autobiographical Notes. 'I don't think anyone knew Jack wrote an autobiography, so we would be fascinated to read it.’ (Simon Fielding via Facebook, 2 June 2014
Jack Goring (1861-1942) author of ‘Autobiographical Notes. ‘I don’t think anyone knew Jack wrote an autobiography, so we would be fascinated to read it.’ (Simon Fielding via Facebook, 2 June 2014)

Crowd sourcing and community participation will include:

  • online submission for new life writing
  • creating biographical entries for the database
  • transcribing memoirs
  • resources for family & community history
  • links to community writing groups
  • an open community blog
  • teaching and learning resources for schools and universities
  • life writing, oral history & skills-sharing workshops

To make this a community resource, we invite you to complete our survey and share it with individuals and organizations interested in life writing, memory and working-class history. Your responses and suggestions will help us plan the Writing Lives project and to make the best case for its support. We will value your answers, however brief or full. (If you can’t tick more than one box for some questions, please just note your answers in comment. Apologies!)

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/writinglives

If you would like to participate in the project, please email Helen Rogers h.rogers@ljmu.ac.uk

Thank you for your time.

 

 

working class; autobiography; digital history; public engagement; family history; community history; life writing

Did you like this article? Share it with your friends!

Tweet

6 Responses to "Writing Lives Survey"

  1. Sue Bowyer says:
    July 23, 2015 at 7:05 pm

    Tried to access the survey, but it’s closed

    Reply
    1. Helen Rogers says:
      July 23, 2015 at 7:46 pm

      Many apologies Sue. Trying to get survey back up. Please bear with me. Helen

      Reply
  2. Peter Park says:
    August 7, 2015 at 11:00 am

    “If you are looking for someone who was in the workhouse, a good place to start is the National Archives”

    This is not correct. Few individuals (generally unusual or problematic cases) are recorded in the correspondence between the unions and the central authorities at TNA. The best place to start is in the local archives covering the poor law union concerned, where records such as admission and discharge registers, indoor relief lists and (after 1869) creed registers list every pauper entering the workhouse.

    Reply
  3. Robin Webb says:
    August 29, 2015 at 6:28 am

    I’m researching a proposed book on the historic inequalities between rich and poor in Britain : how they manifested themselves in terms of justice, living & working conditions, social segregation & discrimination, etc. Individual case studies and written accounts would be very useful.

    Reply
  4. Our Reading List (#6) | Medical Heritage Library says:
    October 6, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    […] The Writing Lives project is asking for your input! […]

    Reply
  5. Our Reading List (#6) – My New WordPress Site says:
    April 8, 2016 at 8:27 pm

    […] The Writing Lives project is asking for your input! […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Log In

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Writing Lives

Writing Lives

© 2021 Writing Lives

Powered by Pinboard Theme and WordPress