Francis Hearn. Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance: The Incorporation of the Nineteenth-Century English Working Class. (Contributions in Labor History, number 3.) Westport: Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1978. Pp. 309. $17.95

1978 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History

The Politics of Proletarianization: A Review Article

1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Michael Hanagan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Political Conditions

The process of proletarianization and its role in the shaping of working class consciousness has captured the attention of French social historians over the last ten years. Until recently, works on French labor history generally neglected the formation of the working class to concentrate on the origins of national working-class parties or trade unions; thus, general histories of the political ‘workers’ movement' abound, to the detriment of occupational or regional studies. As early as 1971, Rolande Trempé's thèse asserted that the transition from godfearing peasant to socialistic proletarian had only just begun when a man put down his hoe and took up a pickaxe. In Les mineurs de Carmaux, Trempé showed the evolving social and political conditions which led coalminers in southwestern France to espouse trade unionism and socialism. The recently published thése of Yves Lequin, Les ouvriers de la region lyonnaise, provides another benchmark in the study of nineteenth-century working class history. Lequin reveals that, for the pre-1914 period in the Lyonnais region of France, the dynamics of proletarianization were more important in promoting worker militancy than its end result, the appearance of an industrial proletariat.

The Work of Class in American History

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sklansky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
History Book

In recent decades, the working class as it was once conceived has lost its paradigmatic place in labor history along with the nineteenth-century struggles from which it emerged. This essay surveys what the Working Class in American History book series has taught us about class in the age of cotton, coal, and steel, reviews the major criticisms of the concept of the working class on which it was founded, and reconsiders what its nineteenth-century subjects still have to say. The essay concludes with a call to reclaim a more capacious conception of class as a political formation based on property relations, describing at once a prospect, a project, and a perspective with labor at its core.

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.

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.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

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