An Artisan Intellectual

To begin, a confession. The present reviewer is one of several historians who have mined material from the anonymous Memoirs of a Working Man (1845), actually written by a tailor, James Carter. We have all referred to him as Thomas or John Carter. This meticulous research is a corrective in several important ways. The misattribution of the author’s name is only the beginning. Charles Knight published Carter’s autobiography under the imprimatur of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In his own memoirs, Knight referred to him as Thomas. This was a slight, Christopher Ferguson here persuasively argues, that reinforced Knight’s promotion of the Memoirs as illustrative of the ‘tendencies of a class’. The anonymous author was, said the publisher, ‘humble’, ‘unknown to the world’; he had nothing marvellous to relate nor any ‘precocious talent’ to display. Instead Carter was an emblematic ‘everyman’, a reassuring presence at a time of political and social turbulence who sought knowledge for its own sake and not for material or political reward. Misnaming him reinforced (and has continued to reinforce) the message ‘that the tailor mattered very little as an actual, individual human being’

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