Adam Bridgen

British labouring-class writing is my main area of research. Broadly, I’m interested in how labouring-class poets — those who had to work of a living, and who received little formal schooling — responded to the dramatic changes in social, economic, and environmental relations that were imbricated with Britain’s rise to imperial dominance in the period 1700-1830.

My first project in this vein was a DPhil at Oxford University: ‘Where blacks and whites in scorching valleys sweat’: British Labouring-Class Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1660-1800. This project considered how labouring-class poets wielded form and genre to write about their occupations, and how this insurgent poetics of work also created a space for remarkably early and critical imaginings of transatlantic slavery. 

My current project, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, explores how working-class writers responded to the impacts of extractivism in their localities during the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780-1840. I’m interested in how a vicinity to and involvement in extractive industries might catalyse environmental understandings, resulting in environment understandings which radically differ from the transcendental vision of nature preferred by William Wordsworth. My first piece on this topic, considering the Shropshire shoemaker-poet James Woodhouse’s apocalyptic take on agricultural improvement, appeared in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (EUP 2022).