Changing Student Populations in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Neville Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
University Education ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
Professional Class

By the turn of the twentieth century, the drive to make medicine more scientific and comprehensive and to limit its ranks to the well prepared had had a profound effect on student populations. Almost universally, students were now older, better educated, more schooled in science, less rowdy, and able to spend larger amounts of time and money in study than their counterparts in 1850 had been. Their ranks, now including a growing number of women, were also likely to include fewer representatives of working- and lower-middle-class families, especially in Britain and America, than a half-century before. Nations still differed, sometimes sharply, in their openness to students from different social classes. The relative openness of the German universities to the broad middle classes, as well as their inclusion of a small representation of “peasantry and artisans,” wrote Lord Bryce in 1885, was a sharp contrast with “the English failure to reach and serve all classes.” The burgeoning German enrollments, he noted, were owing to “a growing disposition on the part of mercantile men, and what may be called the lower professional class, to give their sons a university education.” More students by far from the farm and working classes of Germany, which accounted for nearly 14 percent of medical enrollment, he observed, were able to get an advanced education than were such students in England. A historic transformation in the social makeup of universities, according to historian Konrad Jarausch—from “traditional elite” to a “modern middle-class system”—was taking place in the latter nineteenth century. In France, rising standards in education, together with the abolition of the rank of officiers de santé—which for a century had opened medical training to the less affluent—were forcing medical education into a middle- class mold. In the United States, the steeply rising requirements in medicine, along with the closing of the least expensive schools, narrowed the social differences among medical students and brought sharp complaints from the less advantaged. The costs of medical education in some countries threatened to drive all but the most thriving of the middle classes from a chance to learn medicine.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Costruire per il ceto medio a Milano. Note sulla filiera imprenditoriale

TERRITORIO ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 88-94
Author(s):  
Luca Gaeta
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Property Market ◽  
High Concentration ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Construction Companies ◽  
Land Owners ◽  
The Social ◽  
City Construction ◽  
The City

The precise boundaries of the supply chain for the production of housing for the middle classes in Milan during the boom years are not clearly defined. And yet its activity is of crucial importance to an understanding of the social and tangible forms of the middle class city. Construction companies constituted the key link in relations between land owners, clients, architects and end users of the asset that is a home. This paper offers a provisional picture which documents the firms most active in the sector, the prevailing operating practices and two businessmen who were interviewed. The conclusions identify two lines for further research into the middle class city: the role of non-professional mediators in the property market and the high concentration of up-market new housing construction within the ‘cerchia dei bastioni' (inner part of the city).

The Middle Classes in Non-Western Societies: Inner Dynamics and Self-Assertion Perspective

2015 ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
A. Volodin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The State ◽  
Western World ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
The Social

The present article focuses on the entity of middle classes in non-Western societies. The social formation of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon. As far as the modern Western societies are concerned, the social and political “materialization” of the above-mentioned entity has covered the period of no less than five centuries. The middle class in modern transitional societies began to emerge quite recently, with a few notable exceptions, after gaining sovereignty. That is one of the reasons why political systems in the non-Western world are mostly fragile and susceptible to instability of different kinds and origins. The so called “Arab awakening” gives a vivid example for the “underdevelopment” of indigenous middle classes. Whilst in the advanced industrial societies middle classes were (and are) the building blocks of social structure, economic and political development, elite recruitment, etc., among the non-Western societies (with the salient exception of the North-East Asia) the process of the middle class institutionalization as well as its economic and political self-assertion is still under way, somewhere at the initial stage of development. Comparing various non-Western societies from the middle class inner dynamics as well as self-assertion perspective, the author concludes that in the ultimate analysis, the maturity of this process is dependent on the pro-active and creative role of the State. The latter serves as the main driving force of the middle class consolidation and the instrument of political and economic systems for increasing and advancing development. The cases of India, on one hand, and Indonesia, on the other, demonstrate convincingly that the State remains the leading institution of the society able to accelerate economic growth and development, but also to stimulate the emergence and socio-political assertion of the middle class in contemporary non-Western world.

The Lady Lisle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Ifill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Child

The Lady Lisle features two near-identical boys from different ends of the social spectrum. The possibility of altering the development of their inborn natures through upbringing and education is explored and contested when the two are swapped by the villain, Major Varney. The upper-class child is sent to a middle-class school where he is raised in such a way as to negate detrimental qualities which initially seemed innate. Contrastingly, the lower-class child, James, impersonates the true heir and proves to be selfish, violent and eventually murderous, like his father. Yet it is never entirely clear to what extent James’s behaviour is due to heredity or to his emotionally abusive upbringing. A shift in narrative tone is identified which moves from making allowances for James due to ‘nurture’ towards castigating him as bad by ‘nature’. In this way Braddon raises questions about the malleability or fixity of the personality, about how we define, recognise and value naturalness, but ultimately combines the forces of education and hereditary degeneracy in order to segregate the lower classes, and to bring the morally upright middle classes together with the affluent upper classes.

A divided city

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-184
Author(s):  
Alice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholics

Belfast’s middle classes lived in a divided city. Politically, Belfast was divided for the period under review into Conservative and Liberal camps. Religious divisions existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and within Protestantism itself. Society was also separated into different classes, with the middle classes positioned above the working classes and below the aristocracy. Political, religious and class tensions existed in every industrial city, of course. However, in Belfast, religious division assumed a particularly ugly and bitter hue. This chapter focuses on an elite living in a society divided along lines of both class and religion. The relationship of Belfast’s elite to the city’s working classes and the local aristocracy is explored; while a discussion of Belfast’s middle-class Roman Catholic community assesses the extent to which it was integrated into the city’s elite. The chapter also examines the relationship between the middle classes and the city’s growing sectarianism.

scholarly journals The Social Thought of the Action Française

1961 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Edward R. Tannenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Modern Industrial Society ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Charles Maurras ◽  
The Church

The Action Française was the most notorious reactionary movement in twentieth-century France. From the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of the Vichy Regime it carried on its campaign against “the principles of 789”, which many Frenchmen (and other Western Europeans) mistakenly blamed for the “evils” of modern industrial society. But it represented neither the frustrated lower-middle classes that were attracted to fascism, nor the genteel bien-pensants who pined for the good old days” under Louis XVI or Charles X. Its leaders were café intellectuals who flaunted their newly acquired devotion to the monarchy and the church. They were professional nativists clamoring or a return to the traditional virtues of a golden age that never insisted. Their utopia was a highly intellectualized daydream invented by charles Maurras.

“The Whirl of Life” The Social Structure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social

This chapter explores the intricacies of the first discernible class structure that conformed to normative standards of socioeconomic status in Chicago's history. Black Chicago developed a very small but distinguishable upper class, large segments within the broad middle classes, enormous laboring classes including industrial and service sector workers, and an underclass. The members of the upper class owned and managed businesses, chose housing commensurate with their status, consumed their disposable income with conspicuous delight, engaged in civic activities, and socially acted as a group apart from other segments of their racial cohort to which they traditionally held their primary social allegiance. The middle class focused on occupation, wealth production, educational attainment, cultural interests, and character. The working-class, however, formed the bulk of black Chicago's citizenry.

Boys, Girls, and Kodaks

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 215-255
Author(s):  
Lucie Ryzova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Efficacy

This essay looks at a little studied genre of photographic albums—‘peer albums’—created by young Egyptian men and women through the middle decades of the twentieth century. These strongly gendered albums are characterized by the visual exclusion of social seniors, and were typically kept hidden from them. As photographic objects embedded in particular social relationships and contexts, these albums speak of how a classed and gendered self emerged in early- to mid-twentieth-century Egypt through a range of practices, of which photography-making (and album-making) was part. But photography also had its own agency in engendering new practices. The social efficacy of vernacular photographs was predicated on a combination of photographic indexicality and performativity. Through the making of such albums, young modernity-claiming Egyptians were asserting, performing and negotiating the parameters of their middle-class urbanity, their emerging positions as modern gendered subjects and as adolescents. Together with the range of peer activities in which they were embedded, these albums represented zones of autonomy free from patriarchal control, but still nested within larger patriarchal structures. Ultimately these albums show how particular historical subjects come to be through engagements with objects; and how patriarchy and individualism construct each other.

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