‘The Property of 1851’

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-188
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Hospitality Industry ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Henry Mayhew ◽  
Great Exhibition

This chapter, which discusses Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, George Augustus Sala, and the writers for Punch magazine, explains that the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to a sudden demand for short-term accommodation in London. A popular display of ‘model’ cottages at the Exhibition spoke to wider concerns in the period about the condition of working-class housing. Though Dickens went to see the cottages, the literature of the Exhibition year reveals an interest in other kinds of rented space, which are sites of negotiation between the local, national, and global. Mayhew and the Punch circle saw the growth of the hospitality industry and the resourcefulness of Londoners as a cause for laughter. Meanwhile, Dickens, Collins and Sala were drawn to the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Leicester Square. Here, hotels and lodgings brimmed not only with tourists but also with Continental spies and exiles, arriving in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

EATING THE WORLD: LONDON IN 1851

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 587-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Prasch
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Foreign Population ◽  
The World ◽  
Henry Mayhew ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Great Exhibition

“London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, has been a curious sight even to Londoners,” Henry Mayhew declared in 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to “Enjoy Themselves,” and to See the Great Exhibition, his comic instant novel about the transformation of London in the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayhew proceeded to detail what had grown curiouser and curiouser about the London scene in that climactic year: “New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis, with a family from Pekin, and a lady with feet two inches and a half long, as proof of the superior standing she had in society; Mr Calin [sic; he means Caitlin] had re−opened his Indian exhibit; Mr Wyle [sic; he means Wyld; instant novels apparently did not allow much time for proofreading] had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with a view of cramming into it – ‘yeah, the great globe itself’” (132). Elsewhere in Mayhew's parodic panorama of London's exhibition mania, he offered a view of other globalized London scenes, focusing on celebrated chef Alexis Soyer's new restaurant, “where the universe might dine, from sixpence to a hundred guineas, of cartes ranging from pickled whelks to nightingale's tongues . . . from the ‘long sixes,’ au natural of the Russians, to the ‘stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,’ or the ‘cold roast Bishop’ of New Zealand” (2). Mayhew's imaginary menu, with its cannibalistic extremes, expresses a wider concern about the deluging of London by foreigners come to see the Great Exhibition (some 60000 “extra” foreigners – beyond, that is, standard visiting numbers – were estimated to have actually visited, mostly from the Continent, that year, roughly doubling the existing foreign population of London; see Auerbach 186), which found expression in an amused (when not more genuinely terrified) xenophobia that often focused on foreign foodways.

scholarly journals Savings bank depositors in a crisis: Glasgow 1847 and 1857

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Ross
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Savings Banks ◽  
Savings Bank

Savings banks were created as a means to encourage the newly created working class to save for the uncertainties of urban industrial life. This article explores the success of the Savings Bank of Glasgow, and pays particular attention to the response of savers to the financial and commercial crises of 1847 and 1857. The crisis of 1847 was shallower but longer lasting in Glasgow, while that of 1857 was greatly exacerbated by local conditions in the short term, but of little long-term importance to savers. It suggests that, in both crises, some elements of contagion may have been present but that those who panicked in 1857 were systematically different from those who did not.

scholarly journals Utopian disjunctures: Popular democracy and the communal state in urban Venezuela

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Community Organisations ◽  
The City

This article examines the Venezuelan government’s efforts to establish a ‘communal state’ through the eyes of working-class chavista activists in the city of Valencia. It argues that the attempt to incorporate grassroots community organisations into a state-managed model of popular democracy produces a series of ‘utopian disjunctures’ for the actors involved. These disjunctures, the article contends, stem from conflicting political temporalities within the chavista project, as long-term aspirations of radical democracy clash with more short-term demands to obtain state resources and consolidate the government’s power. The case highlights the tensions generated by efforts to reconcile radical democratic experiments with left-nationalist electoral politics.

Divided Households

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-398
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Neckerman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Extended Families ◽  
Kin Relations ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Extended Households ◽  
Economic Motives

The structure of the extended family is often described as a strategy for coping with poverty, unemployment, or migration (Agresti 1979). Whether extended kin relations are thought to be short-term and calculative (Anderson 1971) or bound by ties of reciprocity (Hareven 1982), the extended household itself is assumed to be adaptive to the material conditions under which working-class families live. This characterization is supported by studies of the present-day poor (Angel and Tienda 1982; Stack 1974; Stern 1993). Although Ruggles (1987) questions the importance of economic motives for nineteenth-century extended families, he suggests that by the early twentieth century there is evidence that extended households were increasingly strategic.

The Aids-Afflicted Employee: Medical, Operational and Legal Concerns for the Hospitality Industry

1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Alan Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hospitality Industry ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Food Handling ◽  
Short Term ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legal Problems

The AIDS-afflicted employee remains a serious concern for hospitality operators. Medical experts, however, continue to stress that there is no danger of AIDS transmission through food handling, and courts and civil rights enforcement agencies are citing medical evidence to expand legal protections for employees with AIDS or related conditions. Educating employees and the public about these facts remains the best long-term strategy for hospitality operators, while short-term strategies that involve firing an employee who is still physically able to work will present legal problems.

War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf 1914–1918

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 257-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Unskilled Workers ◽  
German Revolution ◽  
Insufficient Knowledge ◽  
Skilled And Unskilled Workers

The causes of any revolution are notoriously hard to discover. Despite years of effort, historians still disagree about the relative importance of the short-term and long-term causes of the German revolution in 1918–19. Some describe the “events” at the end of the war as a largely unrevolutionary desire for peace and food, brought about by the privations of the war years; others explain them as the culmination of decades of escalating class conflicts, which the conditions of war sharply exposed. One problem with this whole debate has been an insufficient knowledge of exactly what happened to Germany's workers during the war. Although most historians agree that money wages went up, real wages declined and most people ate less, few have been able to gauge the extent or importance of the change in wages or determine whether workers were simply somewhat hungry, malnourished, or starving. Furthermore there is not enough known about the composition of the work force during the war and the different hardships endured by skilled and unskilled workers.

An Education for the Whole People

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-199
Author(s):  
Anton Howes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
Government School ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Great Exhibition

This chapter emphasizes Henry Cole and Prince Albert's intention to create a top-down system of industrial education, as seen in countries like France. It discusses how Cole sought to align the Great Exhibition with the movement for working-class self-sufficiency. It also talks about how Cole tried to use the Royal Society of Arts to set up new drawing schools for artisans in towns where there was not already a government school of design. The chapter draws attention to a civil servant named Harry Chester who wrote to the Society with a suggestion, imploring it to aid the mechanics' institutions in late 1851. It describes Chester's obsession to improve education, even inventing a slow-burning stove to make sure classrooms would be warm on cold mornings.

scholarly journals The Precariat Class Structure and Income Inequality among US Workers: 1980–2018

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-469
Author(s):  
Joshua Greenstein
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Us ◽  
Part Time ◽  
And Gender

I apply the precariat class schema developed by Standing to the US workforce to illustrate an increased polarization between those who do and do not have quality jobs from 1980 to 2018. I use a decomposition of inequality to show that the precariat class structure explains a substantial and growing portion of income inequality. The precariat is typified by unstable, short-term, part-time, and benefit-free jobs. I find that that the precariat make up a large and growing share of the US workforce, while the “old” working class shrank precipitously. I also show that the demographics of the precariat and the old working class are substantially different in terms of race and gender.

scholarly journals Transnational Contract Work and the Remaking of Class among Polish Workers in Construction and Shipyards: Between Collective Subjugation and Stratified Empowerment

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Anna Matyska
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Construction Industry ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Contract Work ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Class Hierarchies

In late capitalism, class is increasingly made on the move, not in static locations, as different forms of mobility resonate with the making of class in different ways. Poles are the leading European nation who move abroad. However, what the transnationalization of class means for the Polish workforce in the context of diversified employment and mobility regimes has remained underexplored to date. In this article transnational mobility is seen as enacted under the employment umbrella of transnational subcontractors and staffing agencies for short-term contracts abroad. The author focuses on Poles who work in the construction industry and shipyards and explores how transnational contract work conditions workers’class relations and experiences, with the aim of grasping the collective and individual experience of working and living “on a contract” and how this affects their situation in Poland. The article shows that what in most research appears as a working-class mobility populated by low-skilled and vulnerable Polish migrants emerges on the ground as far more heterogeneous and dynamic, marked by a common transnational subjugation as well as inner class hierarchies and antagonism. The argumentation draws on a multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Poland in 2014–2017.

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