"Spasm" and Class: W. E. Aytoun, George Gilfillan, Sydney Dobell, And Alexander Smith‪.‬

THE BRIEF FLORUIT OF THE "SPASMODIC" POETS FOLLOWED CLOSELY ONE OF I nineteenth-century British radicalisms most signal defeats--the ejection of the 1848 People's Charter. Spasmodic poems also "consistently [took] as their subject a young poet's struggle to write the poem that would make him famous" (1)--a conspicuous underlying theme of Wordsworth's Prelude (1850), as well as the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Such personal and collective struggles in fact provided signature-themes for hundreds of English and Scottish working-class and humble life poets of the era, who penned Shelleyan "dream visions," declaimed in the voice of rustic prophets, and focused their aspirations on the tenuous outlines of a more democratic culture to come. Melodrama and popular stage productions were also quintessential mid-Victorian working-class genres, (2) and political relevance may be found in contemporary critical tendencies to attack the Spasmodic poets for their melodramatic and declamatory extravagance. Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, Gerald Massey, and Ebenezer Jones, in particular, were working- or lower-middle class in their origins and education, and several of these poets had contributed to the democratic fervor which culminated in the People's Charter of 1848. Under the penname "Bandiera," for example, Massey had written revolutionary verses, and Jones's pamphlet on Land Monopoly (1849) anticipated arguments made famous by Henry George in Progress and Poverty two decades later. (3) Smith followed with interest the actions of Chartism's Scottish wing, and Dobell's first poem, The Roman (1850), celebrated an imaginary hero of Italian independence after the manner of Browning's Sordello and Bulwer-Lytton's Rienzi.