Visions of Carn Brea

Yeates, Duncan (2023) Visions of Carn Brea. Doctoral thesis, Falmouth University & University of the Arts London.

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Abstract / Summary

This thesis is an investigation into the nineteenth-century labouring-class poet, John Harris
(1820-1884). Harris was a Cornish miner who managed to educate and raise himself to be
a cleric in Falmouth. He published fifteen volumes of poetry during his lifetime, all of
which received the attention of various national literary presses. Harris won the
Shakespeare tercentenary prize in 1864 and was the first winner from a labouring-class
background. Harris has received very little critical attention after his death and this thesis
argues that, as a conservative labouring-class poet he is out of fashion. It explores how
critical attention has overwhelmingly focused on radical labouring-class poets such as
Chartists. This thesis argues however that during his lifetime Harris’s work was, for a time
at least, fashionable and attractive to the upper classes because of the politically
conservative stances he took and that his politics meant he was able to attract patronage.
Harris’s ‘value’ to patrons as a paragon of Victorian religious virtue and industry was an
expedient example to his labouring peers. I will argue that Harris is worthy of note not just
because of his somewhat unusual politics but also because of the idiosyncratic thematic
and formal qualities of his corpus. Harris’s autobiography confirms that his selfpresentation was central in gaining patronage which ranged from individuals with wealth
and social standing who sponsored him when his writing was in its infancy to the literary
institutions and prominent individuals that provided support to him as he attempted to
maintain and develop his literary career. The influence of his patrons on the thematic
concerns of Harris’s corpus have caused him to be ignored by literary critics due to its
surface level conservatism. A closer examination reveals Harris’s idiosyncratic
hybridisation of the conventions of eighteenth-century Romanticism and nineteenthcentury poetics concluding that in an era where metrical schemes were abundant, Harris
was a master and innovator of form.

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