Between art and the class struggle. The collective identity of typography workers n the context of 19th century sociocultural changes

This study aims to link the cultural history of early industrialization with the beginnings of the labour movement, exploring the changing collective identity of printers and typesetters, both elite and elitist skilled print workers, at a time of basic social change. Due to their proximity to written culture, typographers were the first manual workers to take up the pen and themselves reflect on the changes in their position. The source material consists of Czech and German texts from the latter half of the 19th century. In order to compare typographers’ changing identities, texts and conditions from the Early Modern period are also examined. In addition to texts written by typographers, an examination is also made of typographic association activities and typographers’ strikes, as typographers’ identities increasingly changed