Authority and Rebellion in Victorian Autobiography

1978 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Krenis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
Childhood Experience ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Family ◽  
Father And Son

It has been a literary (if not strictly historical) commonplace that the later nineteenth century was a time of pervasive rebellion of sons against fathers. For example, Butler's The Way of All Flesh and Gosse's Father and Son are texts often cited as indicative of a broader social phenomenon. “As Irish life runs to secret societies,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “so English life seems to run naturally to parricide movements. We are a nation of father haters.” Yet father-hating did not become conspicuous until the Victorian period, when, in contrast to the reputed submissiveness of the eighteenth-century son, a “growing self-consciousness by the son of his role as liberator” surfaced in fictional and biographical writing. Whether such a rebellion actually took place on any large scale is impossible to determine. Few men record such things, and when they do their real feelings tend to remain concealed or not fully understood. The premise of this study, based on selected examples of autobiography, is that the peculiar desperation of many Victorians to buttress eroding forms of traditional patriarchal authority had its first and perhaps most crucial effects within the family itself, intensifying ordinary generational conflict and its usual quota of rebellion, guilt, and neurosis. Amidst the conventional catalogues of accomplishment, there is a striking pattern of childhood experience within the family that incubated some version of future rebellion and profoundly affected the writers' emotional lives.Open warfare between generations is uncommon; most often rebellion instead employs a disguised language and context for its articulation.

Ephemera

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-188
Author(s):  
Catherine Massip
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Short Life ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Major Medium

Among the documents which give access to musical life and its various events, ephemera occupy a special field. The word (ephemeron singular; ephemera plural) covers several kinds of written or printed documents largely scattered but being produced for a short life and not subject to be handled and stored in a permanent way. “Those papers of the day” as defined in eighteenth century were produced on a large scale in the nineteenth century when newspapers became the major medium for publicity. The main purpose of these documents was primarily information and publicity. This chapter argues how ephemera may be read not as mere sidelines to culture but as central documents pertaining to the wide and complex intellectual issues in music.

Private Ordering and the Chinese in Nineteenth Century Straits Settlements

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Cheng Han TAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Malay Peninsula ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
British Policy ◽  
English Law ◽  
Colonial Government

AbstractThe Straits Settlements comprised a group of British territories located in the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It initially comprised Penang, Singapore, and Malacca, and was formed in 1826. Unlike Malacca which was a thriving city with a substantial Chinese community, Penang and Singapore were relatively uninhabited when the British arrived, but Chinese immigration to both territories swiftly took place and on a large scale. For much of the nineteenth century, British policy towards the Chinese community in the Straits was one of minimal governance. They were largely left to order their affairs privately and this suited the Chinese, who tended to be aloof from the machinery of government and were also unfamiliar with English law. While there were many positive aspects of such private ordering, some negative features included the manner in which secret societies evolved and the treatment of coolies. It was only when the colonial government introduced strong measures that these negative aspects were ameliorated.

scholarly journals Vestidos y adornos: la crítica a las apariencias exernas a través de la prensa española (finales del siglo XVIII- siglo XIX) = Dresses and ornaments: criticism of outward appearances through the Spanish press (late eighteenth century-nineteenth century)

2017 ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Crespo Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
Negative Results ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Spanish Press ◽  
Newspaper Articles

<p>Este trabajo estudia los discursos que sobre la moda y el lujo recogió la prensa española (especialmente la cercana al pensamiento religioso) entre finales del siglo XVIII y el siglo XIX con el objetivo de entender qué motivos se indicaban para querer controlar la apariencia externa. Así, elementos como la moralidad, la economía o los resultados negativos que provocaba en la mujer y en la familia, han sido los principales temas analizados a través de los artículos periodísticos.</p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This paper studies the discourses about fashion and luxury appeared in the Spanish press (especially in the religious press) between the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century in order to understand what reasons were indicated to control the external appearance. Thus, elements such as morality, economy or the negative results caused in women and the family, have been the main topics discussed through newspaper articles.</p>

Open Elites: Recruitment to the French Noblesse and the English Aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. McCahill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Past ◽  
Closed Group ◽  
Large Scale Land ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Almost All ◽  
New Recruits ◽  
Landed Elite

Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.

Filling the Gap between Radishchev and the Decembrists

Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raeff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

Gurney and Sons

2019 ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Hugo Bowles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Design Structure ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
David Copperfield

Dickens learned shorthand in 1828 from a manual called Brachygraphy, written by Thomas Gurney, which he memorably describes in David Copperfield as a ‘savage stenographic mystery’. This chapter contextualizes the mystery by placing Gurney shorthand in its historical context, as one of many competing alphabetical shorthand systems in the Victorian period. Section 1.1 of the chapter traces the chronological development of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century stenographies and contrasts the alphabetical design, structure, and contents of Brachygraphy with the phonographic system of Isaac Pitman, which came to dominate the nineteenth-century market. Section 1.2 sets out the principles of economy in speech and writing which constrained stenographers in the design of their systems. Section 1.3 examines the surviving shorthand texts that Dickens produced. It also introduces Dickens’s ‘Manchester notebook’, showing how his shorthand teaching notes sought to iron out defects in the Gurney system and provide creative alternatives.

scholarly journals Родословная бурят хоринского рода харгана: на материале тибетоязычной автобиографии Галсан-Жинбы Дылгырова (1816–1872?)

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-340
Author(s):  
Elena G. Batonimaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Siberian Branch ◽  
The Family ◽  
Tibetan Studies ◽  
Family Trees ◽  
Culture And Language

Introduction. In the modern Buryat society, the knowledge of one’s own history, roots, culture, and language is becoming increasingly important. There is also a growing interest in genealogical research as many have started to search for data about their ancestors and their family trees in various archives. To illustrate, one may mention an increasing number of requests made for materials on the lineage and pedigrees of Buryats kept in the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist, and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS. The aims of the present article are, firstly, to add to the data on the Khargana clan of Khori Buryats and, secondly, to investigate the background of Galsan-Zhinba Dylgirov (1816–1872?), an outstanding Buryat religious enlightener of the nineteenth century. The research is based on textological, comparative-historical and historical-biographical methods. Data. The article draws on the evidence contained in Dylgirov’s autobiography written in Tibetan in 1864-1872 and xylographed in the Tsugol Datsan. Dylgirov’s lineage is cited in the first chapter of the book and could be read only by few of those who were literate in Tibetan. Results. The lineage goes back to eight generations, including Dylgirov himself, and covers over 150 years. The origin of the family associates with the ancestor known as Shonoguleg who lived at the turn of the eighteenth century. Of particular interest are also legends and stories that supplement the family history. The examination of the lineage sheds light on the origin of the ethnonym Baatarzhan, a branch of the Khargana clan. Also, the family history contains new data on the Buryat self-governing administration before the first third of the nineteenth century. Clearly, the data of Dylgirov’s autobiography may be useful for further genealogical research.

Order and Disorder in Colonial South India

1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene F. Irschick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
South India ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Political Security ◽  
The One

Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.

“BRIGHT GLANCES” OR “CLEVER HANDS”? THE DOMESTIC IMAGE OF WORKING-CLASS WOMEN IN ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-chuan Yan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Holy Place

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.

The Kevserî Mecmûası Unveiled: Exploring an Eighteenth-Century Collection of Ottoman Music

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-225
Author(s):  
MEHMET UĞUR EKINCI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Compositional Style ◽  
Scale Transformation ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractThe Kevserî Mecmûası is an eighteenth-century Turkish manuscript, which includes, in addition to a variety of music-related contents, a fairly large collection of notations. Given the scarcity of notational sources, it offers invaluable material for understanding the performance practice and compositional style of Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. Having studied a hitherto unknown microfilm copy of this manuscript, the original of which has remained up to now in a private library and closed to our access, the author aims in this article to introduce this source and discuss its potential contribution to the knowledge of Ottoman music. The article is organised roughly in two parts. First, it will present briefly the contents of the manuscript, integrating new evidence and clues about its date, author and purpose into existing knowledge. Second, it will focus on the collection of notations in the manuscript, and by comparing it with the earlier collections will argue that, contrary to the prevailing views expressed in the literature, no large-scale transformation in the style of Ottoman music took place in the early eighteenth century.

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