Detective Fictions: The ‘baby-farming detective’ in Britain, 1867–97

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Hinks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Term Baby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Stylistic Device

Abstract This article examines a series of investigations into the activities of women engaged in the provision of paid childcare and collectively labelled with the term ‘baby-farmer’. This paper looks at the practice of writers representing themselves as ‘baby-farming detectives’. Along with exploring the use of the detective investigation as a stylistic device, it will contend that the strictures it imposed informed the relationship these writers have with paid child-carers. The article also explores how the notion of ‘detectives’ and ‘suspects’ spoke of an assumed right to subject working-class women to inspection. It concludes that these detective fantasies were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to solve either the cases they encountered, or the symbolic problem of baby-farming, leaving these narratives curiously unresolved and their writers impotent. This article not only seeks to explain how and why the link between pecuniary childcare and infant murder was forged and maintained but asserts that this narrative technique has wider implications for scholars of nineteenth-century culture.

“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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Comprehension Process ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cognitive Perspectives

This introduction argues that psychological research on reading and cognition can help literary critics understand the relationship between narrative technique and the phenomenology of reading fiction. It presents cognitive perspectives on fictionality and the comprehension process to show how nineteenth-century novelists render characters and scenes intimately knowable in spite of their fictional status. To explore the realist writer’s pursuit of verisimilar effects, we need to adopt a new form of critical attention, approaching the words of a novel not as bearers of interpretive meaning but as cues that prompt readers to retrieve their existing embodied knowledge, to rely on their social intelligence, and to exercise their capacities for learning.

Women, Class, and Identity Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
General Conditions

The question of the oppression of women, the critique of which constituted feminism as an academic and political pursuit, has been feminism's enduring source of strength and appeal, yielding numerous critical theories and perspectives. This has produced continual conceptual shifts defining an evolving feminism, such as the shift from women to gender and from inequality to difference. It has also involved shifts from theorizing the general conditions of women's experience—oppressed at home and in the workplace, while juggling the conflicting demands of both—to theorizing the implications of the claim that, while gender may be the main source of oppression for white, heterosexual, middle-class women, women with different characteristics and experiences are affected by other forms of oppression as well. A possible way for Marxist feminism to remain a distinctive theoretical and politically relevant perspective might be to return to class, in the Marxist sense, theoretically reexamining the relationship between class and oppression, particularly the oppression of working-class women, within capitalist social formations.

scholarly journals The Politics of Literature and Literacy: Popular Song Writing and Proletarian Poetry in Post-Revolutionary France

2008 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Steven E. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Politics Of Literature ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Song Writing ◽  
Working Class Women

This essay examines the politics of song writing and singing in working-class singing societies in Paris, known as "goguettes," in the early nineteenth century. The practices of writing and singing songs in these societies defined the relationships among participants by equality and good feelings, resisting the hierarchy and domination of the laissez-faire social order. At the same time, these song-writing and singing practices also produced symbolic forms of masculine authority and domination – placing working-class women in positions of subordination. By analyzing this complex politics of writing in this particular case of the "goguettes," this essay argues for recovering working-class writings as significant sources for historians of literacy and for examining the historically specific social and political contexts for the production of specific forms of writing and reading as a way of studying the historical meanings of literacy.

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