Willingly to School: The Working-Class Response to Elementary Education in Britain, 1875–1918

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Large Fraction ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Educational History ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Elementary Schooling ◽  
History Of ◽  
Private Venture

In Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914, J. S. Hurt employs what has become a classic opening in works of social history. “Much of the history of education,” he declares, “has been written from the top, from the perspective of those who ran and provided the schools, be they civil servants or members of the religious societies that promoted the cause of popular education. Little has been written from the viewpoint of those who were the recipients of this semi-charitable endeavour, the parents who paid the weekly schoolpence and the children who sat in the schoolrooms of nineteenth-century England.”Hurt's point is well taken, but he leaves himself open to the retort that he also draws his information mainly from official sources. The parents rarely speak in his book, the children almost never. One could make the same criticism of Phil Gardner's The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. Gardner claims that the so-called dame schools, the private venture schools that served a large fraction of the Victorian working class, were unfairly disparaged and suppressed by educational bureaucrats. But he too depends largely on bureaucratic reports to reconstruct the history of schools outside the state system. Neither Gardner nor Hurt quite succeeds in plumbing educational history to the very bottom: they do little to reconstruct the classroom experience from the viewpoint of the working-class child.What sources could we use to recover that history? There are, of course, the reports of school inspectors, but Gardner warns us that they had a vested interest in condemning dame shools.

Reviews: The Mediæval Mind.: “The Mediæval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages.”, English Rural Economics.: “Large and Small Holdings.”, Education: Actual and Possible: “What is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular.”, ‘“Craftsmanship in Teaching.”, “The Child's Inheritance.”, Heliogabalus: “The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.”, A Chapter of Irish History: “Revolutionary Ireland and its Settlement.”, A Primer of Mendelism: “Mendelism.”, “The Feeble-Minded.”, “The Position of Women, Actual and Ideal.”, “The Living Wage of Women Workers”: A Supplement to the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.”, “La Science de la Civilisation, ou de la réalité.”, “La Théorie de l'Homme et de la Civilisation.”, “Marriage, Totemism, and Religion: An Answer to Critics.”, “La France Economique et Sociale, à la veille de la Réavolution. Tome II. Lee Villes.”, “Contemporary Social Problems”, The Meaning of Social Science, “An Introduction to the Study of Social History and Antiquities.”, “India: Its Administration and Progress.”, “Great Cities of America: Their Problems and Their Government.”, “Child Probleme.”, “Shans at Home.”, “Cat's Cradles from Many Lands.”, “Insects and Disease.”, “Youth's Noble Path.”

1911 ◽  
Vol a4 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-367
Author(s):  
Philip H. Wicksteed ◽  
Gilbert Slater ◽  
P. Geddes ◽  
S. H. Swinny ◽  
S. H. Swinny ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Elementary Education ◽  
Social Science ◽  
American Academy ◽  
Social History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Living Wage ◽  
Rural Economics ◽  
Irish History ◽  
History Of

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MURDER”: THE TRANSGRESSIVE AESTHETICS OF MURDER IN VICTORIAN STREET BALLADS

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Ellen L. O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Popular Texts

To say that this common [criminal] fate was described in the popular press and commented on simply as a piece of police news is, indeed, to fall short of the facts. To say that it was sung and balladed would be more correct; it was expressed in a form quite other than that of the modern press, in a language which one could certainly describe as that of fiction rather than reality, once we have discovered that there is such a thing as a reality of fiction.—Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous ClassesSPEAKING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, Louis Chevalier traces the bourgeoisie’s elision of the working classes with the criminal classes, in which crime becomes either the representation of working class “failure” or “revenge” (396). Chevalier argues that working- class texts “recorded” their acquiescence to and acceptance of “a genuine fraternity of [criminal] fate” when they “described and celebrated [it] in verse” (397). Though a community of fate might inspire collective resistance, popular poetry and ballads, he confirms, reproduced metonymic connections between criminal and worker when “their pity went out to embrace dangerous classes and laboring classes alike. . . . One might almost say [they proclaimed these characteristics] in an identical poetic strain, so strongly was this community of feeling brought out in the relationship between the favorite subjects of working-class songs and the criminal themes of the street ballads, in almost the same words, meters, and tunes” (396) Acquiescence to or reiteration of worker/criminal equations established itself in workers’ views of themselves as “a different, alien and hostile society” (398) in literature that served as an “involuntary and ‘passive’ recording and communication of them” (395). Though I am investigating Victorian England, not nineteenth-century France, and though I regard the street ballads as popular texts which record resistance, not acquiescence, Chevalier’s work usefully articulates the predicament of class-based ideologies about worker and criminal which functioned similarly in Victorian England. More importantly, Chevalier acknowledges the complexity of street ballads as cultural texts..

Rethinking the Twentieth-Century History of Mumbai

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.

Contraception and the Working Classes: The Social Ideology of the English Birth Control Movement in its Early Years

1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus McLaren
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
History Of

A host of social movements which had as their goal the improvement of the living conditions of the working classes emerged in England in the 1820s and 1830s. Owenism and Chartism come first to mind, but historians have recently acknowledged the social significance of a number of less well-known groups that proclaimed the benefits of temperance or mechanics' institutes or phrenology or infidel missions. The birth control movement in its early years has as yet received little attention from the historians of the English working classes. A possible reason is that the opposition of the 'pauper press' to the movement has led later observers to adopt the view that it was simply a middle-class Malthusian crusade which set out to convince the poor that the only escape from poverty lay in individual self-help. In what follows I shall sketch out the general lines of argument advanced by the advocates of birth control and their antagonists in the working-class movement. The purpose of the paper is not to provide yet another history of the first neo-Malthusians, but to use the arguments their activities elicited to gain a better understanding of nineteenth-century working-class culture.

scholarly journals Workers under Communist Rule: Research in the Former Socialist Countries of Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Heumos
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Social History ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Eastern European Countries

SummaryAfter the collapse of the communist system in eastern Europe, the development of the historiographies in the Czech and Slovak republics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Federal Republic of Germany has been characterized by a broad spectrum of differences. This article offers an overview of the ways in which these differences have worked out for the history of the working class in the eastern European countries under communist rule, understood here as the social history of workers. It shows that cultural and political traditions and the “embedding” of historical research in the respective societies prior to 1989, the extent to which historiography after 1989 was able to connect to pre-1989 social-historical or sociological investigations, and the specific national political situation after 1989 make up for much of the differences in the ways that the history of the working class is dealt with in the countries concerned.

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