scholarly journals “Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Extensive Reading ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Women And Children

Abstract It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Increasing Qatari Students’ Motivation Through the Use of Blogs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krystana Golkowska ◽  
Rachid Bendriss
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Extensive Reading ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Medical Education Program ◽  
Arab Students ◽  
Technology Tool

Growing up in an oral culture, students in the Middle East often start their university studies with insufficient reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, which negatively impacts their performance in institutions following a Western style curriculum. Both the literature and anecdotal evidence emphasize the need for helping Arab students to become fluent readers. The authors, who teach in the Pre-Medical Education Program at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, advocate combining explicit instruction in reading strategies with activities that encourage extensive reading. This article describes their pilot project aimed at increasing students’ motivation for reading through the use of a Web 2.0 technology tool.

Labour Woman and the Housewife

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses how Labour Party women engaged with the newly-enfranchised housewife between the wars. It focuses on how Labour Woman represented the working-class housewife and the degree to which it enabled her to speak for herself. It chose everyday domestic life, traditionally assumed to be beyond politics, as the way to connect with unorganised women in their homes. In its Housewife Column the relevance of politics to women’s daily lives was explored through domestic topics such food prices, housework, washing and making clothes. Even with the increasing dominance of recipes and dress patterns in the 1930s, the journal continued to see the housewife as having agency and a distinct experience shaped by class. For Labour Woman interwar domesticity was neither cosy nor rationalised and modern, it was a space which provided the means to engage with the everyday lives of ordinary women.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-106
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Rescue Work ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Infant Behaviour

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

scholarly journals Integrating architectural, social and housing history

Urban History ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick J. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Societal Dimensions

The growth of interest in urban and housing history during recent decades has produced a large volume of studies that has examined broad societal parameters, or themes, such as housing policies, economics and legislation. Concurrently, a growing volume of historical research about households and families has been published, but few studies examine the lifestyles and values of the residents. In sum, there rarely has been any systematic analysis of how longitudinal developments in domestic life are related to developments in the spatial layout, the meaning and use of shared and private spaces and the daily activities these accommodate. In general, the inter-relations between the architectural, cultural and societal dimensions of housing history have commonly been overlooked. This paper argues why, and then illustrates how, integrative concepts and methods can be applied to diversify and enrich recurrent interpretations by referring to a published study of urban housing and daily life in the French- speaking cantons of Switzerland between 1860 and 1960.1

scholarly journals QAR (QUESTION ANSWER RELATIONSHIP) AS AN ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY TO TEACH READING

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Sa’dulloh Muzammil
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Teaching Reading

In English language teaching, teaching reading plays an important role, for reading is one of language skills. In order to succeed doing this activity, a teacher must be familiar and able to employ various teaching readingstrategies that can assist his/her students comprehend what they read. To check students’ reading comprehension, a teacher may propose several questions related to the texts being read. However, if the students have difficulties dealing with these reading comprehension questions, a teacher must be able to help them by introducing reading strategies to overcome the problems. QAR is one of reading strategies which is beneficial for a teacher to check students’ reading comprehension and frame reading question-answer activity in reading phases: pre-, while-, and post-reading; as well as to help students locate answers for the questions.

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