scholarly journals BEYOND THE NATION: PENNY FICTION, THE CRIMEAN WAR, AND POLITICAL BELONGING

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Ellen Rosenman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
Deep Sense

“The nation state . . . found the novel.And vice versa: the novel found the nation-state” (Moretti 17). Franco Moretti's famous formulation has proved as partial as it is influential, challenged by a growing body of transnational scholarship. It is challenged as well by a different set of novels from the canonical ones Moretti has in mind: working-class penny fiction. Given the inequities of society, it is not surprising that this literature expresses a more complicated relationship to England. The working classes laid claim to England itself, insisting that their autochthonic status made them its true sons but that within the nation-state they were subjects, not citizens. The gap between this deep sense of belonging and formal political exclusion structures hundreds of penny novels produced in the mid-nineteenth century.

“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 ‘Useful Knowledge’ versus ‘Wastes of Print’: Working-Class Education and Edward Lloyd

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Manon Burz-Labrande
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Educational Environment ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Public Concern ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Relationship

This article delves into the dismissal of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls as “wastes of print” (Oliphant 1858: 202) on the grounds of public concern for education, and relies on a close reading of an Edward Lloyd unstamped penny publication in order to reassess the relationship between education and the wider world of penny periodicals. The first part examines the upper classes’ attempts to establish an educational environment aimed at the working classes in the first part of the nineteenth century, among which the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and proposes to reconsider the reasons for the relative failure of such initiatives in relation to popular penny publications. I then draw on Edward Jacobs’s analysis of ‘industrial literacy’ and urban street culture to analyse the rejection of such publications as Edward Lloyd’s, by disentangling the mechanisms to which contemporary critics consistently resort. Finally, in keeping with Louis James’s statement that “periodicals are cultural clocks by which we tell the times” (1982: 365), I explore the various pieces contained in a full 1846 number of Lloyd’s penny publication People’s Periodical and Family Library contemporary to the failure of the SDUK, in order to understand the potential dialogue in place with publications and criticism advocating ‘useful knowledge’. This article aims to prove that Lloyd’s penny publications were, in fact, an undeniable point of contact between the working classes and education.

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.

L'Assommoir

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Passionate Debate

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives. This book is a pwerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions, and the introduction examines its relation to politics and art as well as its explosive effect on the literary scene.

II. Class and Political Radicalism in London, 1831–2

1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Radicalism

Class has long been used as an analytical tool in the study of history and much has been written with regard to the formation of class-consciousness, which has to a considerable extent been related to the first half of the nineteenth century and especially to the events surrounding the passing of the first Reform Bill. Professor Briggs has noted the growing use of the term ‘class’ in the early nineteenth century and has postulated a middle-class consciousness created by the media of the Reform Bill and Anti-Corn Law agitations. ‘Sandwiched between an entrenched landed Parliament on the one hand and a bitter but still imperfectly integrated labour movement on the other, the middle classes were compelled to lay down their own postulates and programmes.’ More recently E. P. Thompson, in a brilliant and wide-ranging study of the working classes, has seen the formation of a working-class consciousness which involved ‘consciousness of identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment’ and also ‘ consciousness of the identity of interest of the working class, or “productive classes”, as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system’.

Radical Language and Ideology in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Challenge of the Platform

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Belchem
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Collective Behavior ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
Oppositional Discourse ◽  
Language And Ideology

There is no uniform technique for the study of popular protest and ideology: different periods require different forms of analysis. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd, for example, have to de-code the rituals, symbols, violence, and theatre of seemingly tumultuous collective behavior in order to infer the legitimizing aims and beliefs of the plebeians who were so rebellious in defense of custom. Students of Chartism, by contrast, have a less daunting task. They have merely to consult the movement's literature and propaganda, the very language of which, it is now argued, did not simply mediate but actually served to determine the nature and limitations of proletarian ideology in early nineteenth-century England. There is no need to de-code or decipher this public political language: it must be read as it was phrased, within the structural conventions and constraints of traditional oppositional discourse. Eschewing the orthodox social and economic interpretations of Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones has insisted that the movement's altogether political language was neither symbolic nor anachronistic. It was political monopoly, the Chartists proclaimed and believed, which led to polarization and immiseration; it was political power, therefore, secured by the venerable Six Points, which would facilitate economic and social amelioration. Phrased in the traditional radical idiom of political exclusion, the Chartist challenge acquired unprecedented conjunctural relevance and force in the 1830s as parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the unrepresented. Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10 franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the excluded and unrepresented people, separated from the “shopocrats” who acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged.

Gaskell's Naturalist

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Coriale
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Industrial Novel ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Political Value ◽  
Natural Histories

This essay situates Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novel Mary Barton (1848) within early-Victorian discourses about natural history by studying the figure of the working-class naturalist, Job Legh. Though often regarded as a peripheral character in critical treatments of the novel, Job Legh's presence in Mary Barton suggests the possibilities and limitations that natural history presented for writers struggling to represent the turbulent social and political conditions of England during the 1840s. At times, Job's naturalist activities seem to offer a utopian alternative to the ““dangerous”” Chartist politics practiced by other characters in the novel. At other times, however, Job's knowledge and use of classificatory language alienates him from the working-class community in which he is embedded, a community otherwise excluded from the ““republic of science.”” In the latter part of this essay, I argue that Gaskell, by aligning herself with the conflicted naturalist she imagined, reveals the liminality of her own position as a novelist writing about working-class characters for an audience of middle-class readers. While Gaskell shares this liminal position with her naturalist, however, she does not share his taxonomic vision; rather, she draws on a narrative mode of natural history to develop a sympathetic account of the working classes, a mode that attends to the habits, habitats, and environmental conditions that affect the behaviors and interactions of a living thing. By situating Mary Barton within the naturalist discourses that helped produce it, this essay illustrates the limited political value of Gaskell's working-class naturalist while also suggesting the deep entanglement of novels and natural histories in Victorian Britain.

scholarly journals ‘Praise the Lord! We are a Musical Nation’: The Welsh Working Classes and Religious Singing

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-472
Author(s):  
Helen Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Hymn Singing ◽  
Insight Into

The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down deeply during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’.Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back, when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes.This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.

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.

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