The historical significance of the apprentice and its representation in early modern British literature is to be the focus of a prestigious 12-month fellowship.
Dr Bonnie Latimer, Associate Dean for Education and Student Experience in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business, has secured a Leverhulme Fellowship to fund a year of research that will see her study a broad range of literature from the period 1600鈥1850.
Drawing from literary figures both real and fictional, including the novelist Samuel Richardson and the historical figure Dick Whittington, as well as alternative forms of writing such as sermons, letters, pamphlets and poetry, Dr Latimer will go on to explore the underlying cultural shifts towards young people.
鈥淎pprenticeship is a hot topic in educational policy today, but it was also an essential, formative experience in the early modern period,鈥
says Dr Latimer.
鈥淯p to 40% of male Londoners had been apprentices, and they appear as characters in romances, plays, ballads, newspapers, memoirs, novels, and criminal biographies. But while historians have explored the socioeconomic aspects of apprenticeship, there has been little concerted literary focus upon this vast range of textual material. This project shows for the first time how literary representations of the apprentice across the period reveal shifting ideas of what it meant to be a citizen and how boys could seize political agency in a world shaped by adult men.鈥
The Leverhulme Trust awards around 100 Research Fellowships every year to enable experienced researchers to finish a specific project or piece of work. Dr Latimer鈥檚 project stems from her longstanding work on the novelist Samuel Richardson (1689鈥1761), who also ran a successful print workshop and employed multiple apprentices.
His nephew, Thomas, was one of those apprentices and it was following Thomas鈥 premature death that Richardson decided to develop and publish some advice literature for apprentices more widely. And it was in 2018, when Dr Latimer was invited to write an essay for a Cambridge University Press collection on this Richardson text, that she started to uncover hundreds of texts in different genres.
Among the fictional characters that will come into focus in Dr Latimer鈥檚 work include Dick Whittington 鈥 an actual late medieval Lord Mayor of London who came to be re-imagined centuries after his death as an idealised apprentice-made-good 鈥 and George Barnwell, who personified the 鈥榗riminal apprentice鈥 that became a popular sub-genre of fiction.
鈥淎pprenticeship was a huge cultural and economic force in this period and has been linked to the country鈥檚 economic success,鈥
added Dr Latimer.
鈥淚 hope the outcome of my work will be to identify 鈥榓pprentice literature鈥 as a distinct body of texts and also to shed new light on young people鈥檚 relationship to the adult world of work, citizenship, and political power.鈥