Should the Working Classes Be Assigned a Leading or Supporting Role in the History of Their Own Education?Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century. Neil J. Smelser

1993 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-441
Author(s):  
David Mitch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
History Of

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

scholarly journals Working-Class Housing in Birmingham During the Industrial Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-94
Author(s):  
Eric Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.

Fight Club, 1880: Boxing, Class, and Literary Culture in John Boyle O'Reilly's Boston

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-736
Author(s):  
JAMES EMMETT RYAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Newspaper Editor ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Fight Club ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Because late nineteenth-century American sport was connected to both immigrant assimilation and cultural prestige, this essay first describes Boston amateur athletics during the later nineteenth century. Ireland-born poet/lecturer/newspaper editor John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–90) provides an important example of social and intellectual class mobility from the perspective of an immigrant writer. We observe through O'Reilly's sporting experiences and literary career how the development of upper-class amateur athletics in Boston and the popularity of boxing among its Irish working classes gave him exceptional influence among both groups. His history of boxing, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888), is examined in detail as a key statement on pugilism, masculinity, and American citizenship fame. This view of Boston's intellectual and physical cultures, observed from the standpoint of O'Reilly, a talented writer and a sort of literary counterpart of famed pugilist John L. Sullivan (his friend, occasional sparring partner, and fellow celebrity among the Irish American community), sheds light on newly available pathways to social mobility made possible by simultaneous engagement with literary and athletic cultures.

scholarly journals From Class Solidarity to Revolution: The Radicalization of Arsenal Workers in the Late Ottoman Empire

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.

“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..

scholarly journals Experiences in Common: Slavery and “Freedom” in the Process of Rio de Janeiro’s Working-Class Formation (1850–1910)

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Badaró Mattos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work And Life

SummaryThe present article is based on research into the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. It explores the significant shared experiences of workers subjected to slavery and “free” workers in the process of working-class formation, and aims to demonstrate that the history of that process in Brazil began while slavery still existed, and that through shared work and life experience in Rio de Janeiro, as in other Brazilian cities where slavery was strong during the nineteenth century, enslaved and “free” workers shared forms of organization and struggle, founding common values and expectations that were to have a central importance in later periods of class formation.

scholarly journals Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Somers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

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.

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