Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft’s “Chartist Epic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-112
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Event ◽  
The People ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Conceptual Resources

In 1839, an economically battered Britain teetered on the threshold of revolution. The neo-Spencean poet Capel Lofft aspired to use his anonymously circulated epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, to send it over the brink. Ernest describes, in sanguinary detail, the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A charismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galvanize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. This chapter’s reading of Ernest traces how Lofft employs vanguardism, the belief that artists can lead the masses in a progressive direction, to allay his own doubts about the viability of popular self-governance. More broadly, it utilizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite socialism, the two great working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Lofft’s epic stages several questions with exemplary clarity: is revolution a political event, or the anti-political mechanism by which “politics” is definitively superseded? Are the people the heroes of the emancipatory narrative? Or does the revolutionary leader, rendered sublime by the fervency of his commitment, inevitably eclipse them? Can poetry, a literary mode increasingly defined by its detachment from practical concerns, marshal the rhetorical and conceptual resources of the aesthetic to foster national regeneration?

Class and political action in nineteenth-century England: Theoretical and comparative perspectives

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Sociology ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The French Revolution

Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Kevin Duong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The People ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter introduces redemptive violence and situates its appeal in a paradox intrinsic to modern revolutionary democracy: enthroning the people as sovereign came at the price of dissolving them into a multitude of abstract individuals. It focuses readers’ attention on redemptive violence in nineteenth-century French thought, outlines the structure of the book, and formalizes the book’s main claims. It shows why this book’s argument forces us to rethink inherited accounts of political violence, especially those generated during the Cold War. Where liberal antitotalitarian critics have drawn teleological connections between redemptive violence and totalitarianism, this chapter resists those connections to invite readers to consider what redemptive violence can reveal about democracy.

scholarly journals Political Economy, Ideology and the Persistence of Working-Class Housing Problems in Britain, 1850–1914

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Richard Rodger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Organized Sport ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
The Family ◽  
Urban Conditions

Nineteenth-century housing was not all gloom and doom. For significant elements of the nation the standard of comfort and material welfare improved substantially. Suburbanization of the middle classes in the second half of the century appreciably improved environmental conditions, the family in particular benefitting from a semi-rural existence with only the commuting breadwinner subject to the hostility of urban conditions. In the last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. last third of the nineteenth century rising real incomes were especially beneficial to artisans and the more regularly employed labouring class. Linoleum, curtains, parlour furniture, even pianos transformed the immediate appearance of the home; shoes, a change of clothes and running water that of the people; and the kitchen range, water closets and gas mantles re-arranged the domestic patterns in other respects. The possibility of an outing to the seaside was for many a realistic one, while the growth of organized sport created leisure possibilities, as did the expansion of clubs and other social activities.

The Art of the People

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-86
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Evolutionary Design ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Mystery Plays ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Political Value

This chapter traces the rediscovery of the medieval mystery plays which had been suppressed at the Reformation. The texts were painstakingly recovered, edited, and published in the first half of the nineteenth century, by medieval scholars but also by radicals like William Hone who were keen to emphasize the political value of expanding the literary canon. At the start of the nineteenth century, then, vernacular devotional drama was largely unknown; by the 1850s, the genre had been accorded a place in an evolutionary design that privileged the achievements of Shakespeare, and by the early twentieth century, performance was finally countenanced, albeit under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain. This is a narrative of recuperation but also of misunderstanding, as the mystery plays were also positioned as comic burlesque and farce in constructions of the literary canon which stressed the aesthetic and religious superiority of the Protestant present.

Bread Winner

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The People ◽  
Working Class Women

Nineteenth-century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation's wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape. This book unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives — and finances — of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, the book changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.

scholarly journals “Irish Nights”: Paratheatrical Performances of Melodrama on and off the Belfast Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Phelan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Masses

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

Imagining Socialism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Cooperative Labor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Radical Activism

“Socialism” names a form of collective life that has never been fully realized; consequently, it is best understood as a goal to be imagined. So this study argues, and thereby locates an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century. Imagining Socialism explores this tradition of radical activism, investigating the diverse ways that British socialists from Robert Owen to the midcentury Christian Socialists to William Morris marshalled the resources of the aesthetic in their efforts to surmount “politics” and develop nongovernmental forms of collective life. Their ambitious attempts at social regeneration led some socialists to explore the liberatory potential afforded by cooperative labor, women’s emancipation, political violence—and the power of the fine arts themselves. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that, far from being confined to the “socialist revival” of the fin de siècle, important socialist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic may be found throughout the period it calls the “socialist century”—and may still inspire us today.

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