scholarly journals Styles of Life, the “Labour Aristocracy” and Class Relations in Later Nineteenth Century Edinburgh

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Q. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Working People ◽  
Relative Earnings

The idea of a “labour aristocracy” pervades writing about the British working class of the second half, and especially the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This emphasis is, in my view, correct: the behaviour and consciousness of working people cannot be explained without some such concept of divisions within the working class. But this proposition has too often been allowed to conclude, rather than to commence the enquiry. The fragmentation of the manual working class into different strata and sub-cultures may take several forms, and is bound to have local and industrial variations. In approaching the problem it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between differences in the class situation of various groups of workers, and the formation of separate working class strata – a cultural and political process. Three main levels of analysis are relevant to this problem: the stratification within the working class, in terms of class situations (relative earnings, security, prospects and opportunities, position of subordination or autonomy in the workplace, and so on); the extent to which various strata of manual workers were distinguished by the cultivation of particular styles of life, and by commitment to particular sets of norms and values; and the consequences of these for institutions embodying the interest of manual workers as a class (unions, parties, etc.) and for the patterning of conflict and consensus in the society.

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?

In the inventories of deceased British merchant seafarers: Exploring merchant shipping and material culture, 1860–1880

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Merchant Marine ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Merchant Shipping

Between 1860 and 1880, the years which hold the richest collection of log books at the Maritime History Archive in St. John’s, NL, an average of 4,400 seafarers died per year working in the British merchant marine. Each of these deaths potentially produced an inventory of effects showing the material wealth of working people at sea. These inventories reveal the material possessions of late nineteenth-century seafarers, particularly young working-class men who exposed themselves most to danger but also were the most numerous demographic. By analyzing both what these inventories contain, but also what inventories are missing, it is possible to understand material factors stemming from changing dynamics in a workforce undergoing technological and demographical change.

The Chartists and the Irish Confederates: Lancashire, 1848

1984 ◽  
Vol 24 (94) ◽  
pp. 172-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
W J. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Duration ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
Working People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

During the late nineteenth century Michael Davitt was a persistent advocate of a solid Irish-British working-class alliance to realise the political and social aspirations of the working people of both countries. Though he took it all rather more personally, the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor often made the same point. But the dynamic movement of Englishmen and Irishmen to challenge the establishment that governed both countries and to effect the restructuring of its economic and social bases did not develop during the century spanned by the lives of O’Connor and Davitt despite a brief period of mutually-perceived Anglo-Irish working-class common interest and some active collaboration. The functional life of this ’alliance’ between the English and Irish leaderships during the revolutionary year 1848 was of short duration. But in Lancashire, English Chartists and members of the Irish Confederation combined for several months of agitation before the fledgling fraternisation was smashed by arrests and flagging interest.

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Working-Class Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Exciting Wave

This chapter explores why working-class fictions flourished in the period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s and the distinctive contributions that they made to the post-war British and Irish novel. These writers of working-class fiction were celebrated for their bold, socially realistic, and often candid depictions of the lives and desires of ordinary working people. Their works were seen to herald a new and exciting wave of gritty social realism. The narrative focus on the individual signalled a shift in the history of working-class writing away from the plot staples of strikes and the industrial community, striking a chord with a post-war reading public keen to see ordinary lives represented in books in a complex and realistic manner. The cultural significance of such novels was enhanced as they were adapted in quick succession for a mass cinema audience by a group of radical film-makers.

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.

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