Abstract

The primary aim of this thesis is to examine and analyse the autobiographical production of English coal miners and their families during the period 1790-1945.

This work is of value not only because no sustained study of miners' autobiography exists, but more importantly because autobiographical texts yield valuable, but otherwise inaccessible, information concerning the group.

The coal miners' of England have played a key role in the history of modern Britain. During the period covered by this study coal lay at the heart of British economic development and power, and the industrial and political history of the English mining community reflects this fact.

However, in common with many other sections of the English working class, relatively little is known about the ways in which members of the mining communi ty made sense of their lives. Yet such knowledge is of utmost importance if we are to explain the history and traditions of English mining society.

The Miners' life account provides us with a unique and valuable means by which to explore the nature of thought and feeling which has existed in the English mining communities and which has underpinned its cultural forms. In part this study attempts to analyse and draw together aspects of miners' autobiographical consciousness and their representations of self and society in order to create an impression of how mining lives were lived and appropriated in the period under consideration.

Because the nature of the autobiographical form is complex and its extensive use as a primary source material is controversial, this thesis also addresses issues related to the nature of cultural production and the use of its products; in this case autobiographical testimonies, as a means to know the past. Consequently this study examines the ways in which the lived experience of coal miners' shapes the nature of their autobiographical texts as well as the ends to which their autobiographical production has been put. The work also offers analysis of the ways in which autobiographical information may be best understood and used as a means to explore and reveal the experience of the past.