The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham

1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Radicalism

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

Property, Privilege and Politics: The Coroner in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1801–1846

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Michelle McCann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Work Experience ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the function, status and qualifications of the men that served in the role of county coroner in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This remains an under-researched area when compared to other local government figures of authority. The history of the office exposes tensions within a politically polarised society and the need for changes in legislation. A combination of factors initially undermined the social standing and reputation of coroners. An examination of the legislation on coroners that the administration subsequently introduced suggests that the authority of the office in early-nineteenth-century Ireland was not strictly jurisprudential, but political and confessional by nature. By analysing the personal background, work experience, social standing, political alliances and religious patronage of coroner William Charles Waddell (1798-1878), the paper charts the wider social and political narrative that allowed this eminently respectable Presbyterian figure to secure the role of coroner of County Monaghan.

Gregory King and the Social Structure of pre-industrial England

1977 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. S. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Post War

Despite the rich and exciting work of recent years, the social history of England between the Restoration and the Industrial Revolution still bears something of a hangdog look, scarcely war-ranting, as yet, the cosmic conclusions and ferocious controversies to which students of early Stuart and early nineteenth-century society have grown accustomed. Yet, thanks to the work of one remarkable Englishman, who was born in 1648 and died in 1712, there is one aspect of this pre-industrial period—its social structure—on which we are all happy to pontificate. Gregory King's table of ranks and degrees, on which in the last resort so much of this confidence rests, has now acquired a unique cachet. The continual reproduction in post-war textbooks of this famous document, which we think of as King's ‘social table’ but which he described as his ‘Scheme of the Income and Expense of the Several Famillies of England’, is just the most obvious symptom of its dominant historiographical influence.

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’.

scholarly journals The “Rank and File” and the Social History of the Working Class

1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Cronin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Explanation ◽  
Interpretive Frameworks

Labor history continues to progress. It continues, too, to transform itself from a field staffed by enthusiasts and partisans into a discipline peopled with scholars sympathetic to their subject but also highly conscious of the methods, theories and interpretive frameworks within which they work. The last few years in particular have witnessed a considerable intensification of scholarly controversy within labor history and a growing sophistication of debate. To some extent the discussion parallels the ongoing conversation among social historians about the boundaries of social history, the power of primarily social explanation and the role of language, culture and politics in social history. Unfortunately, however, the stepping up of debate in labor history coincides with a dip – temporary, one hopes, but perhaps more long-term – in the fortunes of labor movements themselves. This conjuncture seems to have produced a sense of pessimism and malaise as the sentimental accompaniment to many of the debates within labor history.

The Halévy Thesis—A Working Hypothesis? English Revivalism: Antidote for Revolution and Radicalism 1789–1815

1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elissa S. Itzkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Working Hypothesis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
Moral Influence ◽  
Evangelical Movement

He “saw England with fresh eyes”, and for more than fifty years Elie Halévy's provocative interpretation of the effect of religion on the Victorian out look has continued to engender lively debate and controversy. After his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, few historians would contest the practical role of evangelicalism and nonconformity in molding Victorian society. What continues to be challenged is Halévy's claim that the moral influence of the evangelical movement is the parameter within which the social history of nineteenth-century England unfolded.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.

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.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
History Of

The introduction sets the scene by exploring the role of Edinburgh as a centre for the development and propagation of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories. It gives essential background on natural history in the Scottish capital in early nineteenth century and the history of evolutionary thought and outlines the aims and objectives of the book. In addition, it explores some of the historiographical issues raised by earlier historians of science who have discussed the role of Edinburgh in the development of evolutionary thought in Great Britain.

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