Friday, Sept. 16th, 2016
Dr. Chris Ferguson (History, Auburn) will present “Learned Tailor or Literary Man? James Carter in the Rise of Modern Britain.”
The London tailor James Carter published an autobiography, three other books, and fifty works of poetry. Yet contemporary reviewers, publishers, and Carter himself routinely claimed up until his death in 1853 that, despite all of these publications, he remained a tailor, and not a “literary man.” This talk seeks to explain their collective confidence in this fiction, demonstrating how the urge to contain individuals within discrete categories in Victorian Britain arose as a by-product of the country’s long march toward modernity.
