SOURCE: Hackett, Nan. “A Different Form of ‘Self’: Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-class Autobiography.” Biography 12, no. 3 (summer 1989): 208-26.

In the following essay, Hackett emphasizes the didactic and socially critical functions of narrative in British working-class autobiography of the nineteenth century.

Francis Russell Hart noted that “Memoir is the autobiography of survival,”¹ yet working-class autobiographers' techniques of survival have caused their works to be ignored as literary works; they have been left to historians for use as documents of social history. John Burnett and David Vincent², singly and now together, have written about British nineteenth-century working-class autobiography. Their scholarship has been responsible for the retrieval of many interesting books; their introductions discuss how childhood, courtship, domestic life, education and work are presented in hundreds of autobiographies. However, their conclusions are drawn primarily from the content of the works. These historians use the autobiographies as social history artifacts rather...