The provision of working-and lower-middle-class housing in late nineteenth-century urban Ireland

Author(s):  
Frank Cullen
2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.


Author(s):  
Tobias Harper

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period. A study of apprenticeship not only tells us how young people learned the skills with which they made their future living, it also casts light on the process of ‘growing up’. However, we still know little about the everyday lives of apprentices, their relationships with their masters, and how young people themselves understood the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing largely on the diary of John Tennent (1772–1813), a grocer’s apprentice who kept a record of his time spent in service, this article aims to broaden our understanding of these themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. It demonstrates that, for young middle-class men like Tennent, apprenticeship played a key role in the transition from boy to manhood.


Author(s):  
Cara A. Finnegan

This chapter examines how viewers in the late nineteenth century made sense of a photograph of Abraham Lincoln, published by McClure's magazine thirty years after his assassination. Revealed to the American public in 1895, nearly five decades after its creation, the daguerreotype reproduction featured a Lincoln few had seen before: a thirty-something, well-groomed, middle-class gentleman. In order to understand viewers' readings of the Lincoln portrait, the chapter investigates portrait photography in relation to the discourses of phrenology and physiognomy. It shows that viewers treated the Lincoln portrait as a vehicle for the exploration of its subject's character. Based on their responses, the viewers saw in the image not only a Lincoln they recognized physically but one whose psychology and morality they recognized as well. Those who composed responses to the McClure's photograph tapped into powerful myths about Lincoln that circulated during the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Anna Gasperini

Abstract This article compares images of food as temptation, and hunger as test, in two samples of late-nineteenth century British and Italian children’s literature. It reads the narratives alongside coeval popular medical manuals on child health, examining recurring descriptions of children as natural gluttons in works dedicated to child nutrition. Putting the select fiction and non-fiction in dialogue with moral, scientific, and nation-building middle-class discourses circulating in both countries, the article finds that the ‘gluttonous child’ narrative was both transnational and transtextual.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
Daniela Bombara

Amour fou between displacement and estrangement in two Sicilian writers of the Nineteenth Century Rosina Muzio Salvo and Cettina Natoli This research aims at investigating the topos of love as deep and extreme passion, in opposition to social stereotypes, in two novels by two Sicilian female writers of the Nineteenth Century, Adelina (1845) by Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815-1866) and Margherita Royn (1886) by Cettina Natoli (1867-1913). In Adelina amour fou is in conflict with the patriotic needs and the moralism of the newborn middle-class society; in Margherita Royn, an overliterary, different kind of love clashes with the materialism and commercialization which dominate in late Nineteenth century. Adelina’s displacement is highlighted by the structure of the polyphonic epistolary novel, in which the protagonist’s ‘reasons of the heart’ are opposed to the opinions of all the other characters; according to a process of Verghian estrangement (Luperini, 1974), they convey a distorted picture of her passion and consider it a weird, unacceptable fact. Margherita is able to see reality only through an overly literary lens of extreme sentimentality; her isolation is manifest in the depiction of her body, consumed by an adulterous passion which contrasts with her husband’s rough physicality; overcome by jealousy, he will end up killing her.


Author(s):  
Christopher Langlois

Franz Kafka was born 3 July 1883 to a bourgeois family in Prague, the Czech capital that in the late nineteenth century belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although his nationality was therefore Austro-Hungarian, Kafka’s parents, Hermann Kafka and Julie Lowy were Jewish, and under the reign of Franz Josef I, Austrian Jews were widely regarded as second-class citizens. As head of a Jewish family growing up in Czech-speaking Prague, Hermann Kafka strongly insisted that his children be raised to speak and act German, the de facto language and identity of social and cultural prestige in Prague during this period. While Kafka exhibited a keen interest in literature and art from a very young age, his notoriously overbearing father was insistent that he should receive education and training for a professional or administrative career, which would allow him to provide his future family with the same level of upper-middle class affluence that Hermann had provided for Franz. Kafka reluctantly capitulated, and on 18 June 1906 he successfully completed a Doctorate in Law from the Ferdinand-Karls University in Prague.


1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”


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