Tom maguire: "An under-paid agitator" in the late-victorian socialist press
Whom the Gods love die young, and thus are they insured of everlasting youth. The idea is full of beauty were it not that this weary old world so much needs those on whom the Gods have bestowed their choicest gifts." (1) So wrote Keir Hardie, Britain's first Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament, in his preface to Machine-Room Chants, a volume of posthumously published poetry written by Tom Maguire and printed by the Labour Leader in April 1895. Maguire, a working-class Leeds socialist, poet, journalist, and labor organizer, died on 9 March 1895 at the age of twenty-nine. In his short life he contributed significantly to the rise of socialism in late nineteenth-century Britain, and his contributions were both literary and organizational. While still in his early twenties, Maguire was a leader in instigating the tide of New Unionism--the effort to broaden the scope of organized labor to include unskilled and semi-skilled workers--that swept Leeds in a number of important strikes from 1889 to '90, including strikes by dyers, gas workers, tailoresses, builders' laborers, and bricklayers. From 1885 to 1895 he also published a great deal of poetry, songs, fiction, and journalism in radical papers such as Commonweal, the Labour Leader, and the Yorkshire Factory Times, as well as his own socialist paper, the Labour Champion. Interestingly, many of his poems feature working-class women speakers, reflecting his experience in organizing Leeds tailoresses, and his journalistic writing is also notable for its play in voice, persona, and perspective. But aside from Machine-Room Chants and another posthumous volume (Tom Maguire, A Remembrance, published by the Manchester Labour Press in 1895), Maguire's work exists almost exclusively in the archives of the radical press. Even these two volumes--Tom Maguire and Machine-Room Chants--reprint verse and prose that originally appeared in socialist newspapers. (2) In publishing their work, nineteenth-century working-class writers were especially likely to be limited to periodical venues; because volume publication has mainly been the privilege of the wealthy or well connected, critics interested in class critique have learned to pay heed to newspapers and magazines, revaluing the Victorian periodical as a poetic medium. (3) As is the case with so many working-class writers, to rediscover and appreciate Maguires career we must rediscover and appreciate the periodical context in which he published. In 1880s Britain, the socialist movement was in an early, inchoate phase encompassing a wide variety of socialist perspectives and persuasions, from anarchist to parliamentarian in politics, from fervently religious to rigorously scientific in mood. Most of the major early organizations were based in London, yet were eager to make footholds in the industrial North, which was everywhere recognized as fertile ground for socialist agitation because of labor conditions and because of the North's radical legacy, which abided in local movements such as co-operativism. Maguire was the son of a working-class Irish Catholic family from what his friend Edward Carpenter called "the dingy wilds of East Leeds," a neighborhood that Tom Steele describes as a "densely populated slum" housing "an enormous immigrant Irish population, possibly 20,000 strong.... The crowded courts and alleys where disease and pollution were widespread, were the breeding ground for socialists like Tom Maguire." Responsible for his mother after his father's death, Maguire, according to Carpenter, "earned what living he could" as "errand-boy, then as photographers assistant, and photographer." (4) At eighteen, he was drawn to socialism after coming across a copy of the Christian Socialist at the Secular Hall bookstall (the seeming inconsistency of the venue and the magazine perfectly illustrates the unfussy bedfellowism of 1880s socialism). He was an early adopter, for at this date, 1883, the organized socialist movement in England had barely begun. …
Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press
Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press Abstract: Amidst a larger surge in the number of books and periodicals published in late- nineteenth-century Britain, a corresponding surge occurred in the radical press. This counter- cultural press that emerged at the fin de siecle sought to define itself in opposition to commercial print and the capitalist press, and was deeply antagonistic to existing political, economic, and print publishing structures. Literature flourished across this counter-public print sphere, and major authors of the day such as William Morris and George Bernard Shaw published fiction, poetry, and literary criticism within it. Until recently, this corner of late-Victorian print culture has been of interest principally to historians, but literary critics have begun to take more interest in the late-Victorian radical press and in the literary cultures of socialist newspapers and journals such as the Clarion and the New Age. Amidst a larger surge in the number of books and periodicals published in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, a corresponding surge occurred in the radical press: as Deian Hopkin calculates, several hundred periodicals representing a wide array of socialist perspectives were born, many to die soon after, in the decades surrounding the turn of the century (226). An independent infrastructure of radical presses, associated with various radical organizations and editors, emerged as an alternative means of periodical production apart from commercial, profit- oriented print. i Literature and literary discourse flourished across this counterpublic sphere, and major authors of the day published fiction, poetry, and journalism within it: in the 1880s, for example, William Morris spent five years editing and writing for the revolutionary paper Commonweal, while George Bernard Shaw cut his teeth as an author by serializing four novels in the socialist journals To-Day and Our Corner. Still, until recently, this corner of late-Victorian print culture has been of interest principally to historians, who have mined the radical archives in search of the origins of the socialist revival, the Labour Party, the internecine conflicts of the British left wing, and so on. ii In recent years, however, literary critics have begun to take more interest in the late-Victorian radical press and the rich literary history expressed within it; not only William Morris, but other major literary contributors, such as Edward Carpenter and Dollie
Integrating Local CNN and Global CNN for Script Identification in Natural Scene Images
Script identification in natural scene images is a key pre-step for text recognition and is also an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems that are designed for multi-language environments. In this paper, we present a novel framework integrating Local CNN and Global CNN both of which are based on ResNet-20 for script identification. We first obtain a lot of patches and segmented images based on the aspect ratios of the images. Subsequently, these patches and segmented images are used as inputs to Local CNN and Global CNN for training, respectively. Finally, to get the final results, the Adaboost algorithm is used to combine the results of Local CNN and Global CNN for decision-level fusion. Benefiting from such a strategy, Local CNN fully exploits the local features of the image, effectively revealing subtle differences among the scripts that are difficult to distinguish such as English, Greek, and Russian. Moreover, Global CNN mines the global features of the image to improve the accuracy of script identification. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach has a good performance on four public datasets.