19C profs: I've got an "industrial literature" spot on a syllabus, where I usually put a Gaskell novel. Suggestions of shorter works that could do a similar job?
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I switched from Gaskell a few years ago too, and replaced with Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”; Cook, “A Song for the Workers”; Landon, “The Factory.” Cook and Landon are especially interesting because of their renovations of the ballad form.
Not literary, so maybe unhelpful, but maybe Engels's "The Great Towns" chapter from The Conditions of the Working Class in England; opening of the chapter has novelistic quality, I think
There's also Sunday Under Three Heads. It's a pamphlet arguing that poor people ought to be able to spend the Sabbath doing things that bring them pleasure. Not much about work per se but you could combine it with an excerpt of Marx maybe? https://www.gutenberg.org/files/922/922-h/922-h.htm
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I can't recall their names but Laura Fisher's *Reading for Reform* covers several *Nickel and Dimed*-style undercover factory girl books
also if it’s not just British, Life in the Iron Mills teaches well too
I think I might have given them a couple pages from the Allen Macduffie book on energy