Biographies of Working Men

Biographies of Working Men is a small collection of short biographical sketches by Grant Allen, published in 1884. The book belongs to the strand of his career devoted to popular education writing for the working class. Allen, a Canadian born Oxford graduate who supported a long literary career partly through magazine journalism and partly through nonfiction books like this one, had a serious commitment to the idea that ordinary people could be lifted by reading about other ordinary people who had made something of themselves.

The biographies in the book are short, perhaps a dozen pages each, and the subjects are deliberately chosen to make the educational point. They include George Stephenson, the railway pioneer who began life as a colliery fireman. James Brindley, the canal builder who was almost illiterate when he started. Bernard Palissy, the French potter who worked for years in poverty to discover white enamel. Telford the engineer, the shepherd astronomer James Ferguson, the weaver poet Robert Burns, and a few others. The pattern is the same throughout. A child born poor, often without formal education, encounters an idea or a skill that becomes a lifelong passion, and through long quiet labour reaches a kind of distinction that did not seem possible at the start.

Allen wrote this kind of book quickly and well, and the prose is direct in a way the late Victorian magazine reader would have found easy. The political point is gentle but real. The book is essentially an argument that genius is more widely distributed than the social order acknowledges, and that the working class deserved both the leisure to discover its own talents and the schools and libraries to develop them. By 1884 this argument was familiar in liberal English thought, but it was still worth making in a popular form.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is best read in chapter sized pieces. For readers interested in late Victorian self help literature, it works alongside Samuel Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers, which it partly imitates but treats with more political awareness. For readers interested in Grant Allen himself, this is the social conscience side of a writer who was also producing detective stories, novels, and natural science journalism in the same years.