Child Labour, the Working-Class Family, and Domestic Ideology in 19th Century Britain

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Davin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Domestic Ideology

‘A man’s work was a man’s life’

Bread Winner ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 62-85
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Young Age ◽  
Male Identity ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Legislative Framework ◽  
Over Time

This chapter reveals the significance for work to male identity. Here, it shows how the centrality of work dominates men's autobiographies. Work was the key feature of a man's life and it was very often the motif by which male writers structured the story of their life. For most working-class men, work was equated with manhood — ‘I was a man and I knew it’. The chapter goes on to discuss how many Victorian children commenced their working lives at a considerably young age, particularly early in the reign when the place of children in the labour market was much more loosely regulated. Furthermore, to a far greater extent than girls, boys' experiences of work were shaped by the legislative framework as child labour laws became increasingly restrictive over time. This changing legal framework for child labour is clearly visible in the male autobiographies.

Infectious thinking: the pathophysiology of 19th-century pedagogy

2020 ◽  
pp. medhum-2019-011827
Author(s):  
Jonathan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Training System ◽  
National Education ◽  
Modern School ◽  
System A ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 19Th Century

Systems for improving public health and organisations for providing national education were two of the great reforming achievements of 19th-century Britain. Despite the overlapping personnel and historical contemporaneity, scholars have rarely considered the two projects in tandem. This essay shows that developments in public health were at the heart of two foundational moments in the rise of 19th-century mass schooling. The originators of the monitorial system, a method of peer-educating working-class children cheaply that dominated British mass schooling at the turn of the 19th century, were deeply invested in the origin and spread of vaccination. Similarly, the first state teacher training system was conceived by a medical doctor in the 1830s, who first rose to prominence investigating cholera in Manchester earlier in the decade. Using archives of school providers, training institutions and the educational state apparatus, I show that medical prophylactic interventions of vaccination and sanitary reform helped galvanise the government into educational reform, by imagining the working class as pathological and providing templates for their palliation. By showing that the roots of the modern school system were deeply imbricated in attempts to combat smallpox and cholera, both in form and in epistemology, this paper argue that critical medical humanists should consider the role of epidemiological thinking in institutions and disciplines which seem, on first sight, removed from the clinic and the lab.

Making emergency responders visible: working-class responses to industrial disaster in 19th-century journalism and poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. medhum-2020-011892
Author(s):  
Rosalyn Buckland
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Emergency Treatment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Emergency Responders ◽  
The Face ◽  
Industrial Disaster

Hidden beneath the ground in coalmines, or behind the walls of factories, injured bodies of workers have too often been overlooked. Using the 1842 Hartley Colliery disaster as a case study, this paper contrasts journalistic neglect with the ways in which working-class poets illuminated responses to large-scale injury. Often the greatest difficulty in industrial disaster was in securing access to trapped victims. Arriving late on the scene, neither journalists nor doctors were able to influence the outcome of events: in most cases emergency treatment was provided by workers themselves. While journalists struggled to portray these men’s stories, working-class poets such as Joseph Skipsey brought attention to their collaborative actions even in the face of injury or death. The actions of these colliers as first responders had a lasting significance, foreshadowing working-class involvement in the wider cultural shift towards collective responsibility for healthcare.

Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: the Case of Samuel Bamford

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labour History

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

scholarly journals Surviving as a Widow in 19th-century Montreal

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 148-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Wage Earner ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Insurance Policies ◽  
Family Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
Set Up

This paper is a preliminary attempt to examine demographic and economic aspects of widowhood in 19th-century Montreal and the ways working-class widows in particular could survive. Although men and women lost spouses in roughly equal proportions, widows remarried much less frequently than widowers. In the reconstruction of their family economy that followed the loss of the main wage earner, some of these women sought work themselves, mostly in the sewing trades or as domestics or washerwomen. A few had already been involved in small shops, and some used their dower, inheritance, or insurance policies to set up a shop, a saloon, or a boarding-house. Children were the most valuable asset of a widow, and they were more likely to work and to stay at home through their teens and twenties than in father-headed families. Additional strategies, including sharing housing with other families, raising animals, or trading on the streets, were drawn upon; they established an economy of makeshift arrangements that characterized the world of many working-class widows.

Grace Aguilar’s double-vision to a feminized religiosity through the Torah’s laws on inheritance and vows

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555
Author(s):  
Bernon Lee
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Biblical Women

Grace Aguilar’s interpretation of the Torah’s laws on female inheritance and a daughter’s vows in her 19th-century biography of biblical women The Women of Israel sits between a proselytizing Anglo-Protestant rhetoric and an androcentric Judaism. This article traces the contours of her feminized, contemplative brand of Judaism through her reading of these laws. The article finds her arguments against the main currents of Judaism of the period to be of a social-religious strain familiar to, yet contending with, the ‘tolerant’ Christianity of Victoria’s England. In staking her space between traditions, Aguilar adopts (and adapts) the terminology of Christian parlance and the Christianized domestic ideology the terms facilitate. The result is a subversive, if ambivalent, work of biblical interpretation that seconds a hegemonic cultural vision for domestic accord in substituting Judaism for its religious heart. Aguilar’s recovered ‘authentic’ Judaism, then, emerges as Christianity’s worthy twin that stands its ground against misogyny.

James Malcolm Rymer

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
String Of Pearls

James Malcolm Rymer (b. 1814–d. 1884) created two of the most influential monsters of 19th-century fiction: Varney the Vampyre and Sweeney Todd. The son of an Edinburgh-born London engraver, Malcolm Rymer, who published poetry and a Gothic novel, Rymer was raised in a working-class literary-artistic family. His brothers Gaven and Chadwick were artists, and his brother Thomas put his engraving skills to criminal use as a serial financial forger. For the penny periodicals magnate Edward Lloyd, Rymer prolifically wrote bestselling serials including Ada, the Betrayed, or, The Murder at the Old Smithy (1843); The Black Monk, or, The Secret of the Grey Turret (1844); Varney, the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847); and the Sweeney Todd tale The String of Pearls, a Romance (1846–1847, expanded in 1850 as The String of Pearls, or The Barber of Fleet Street). In the 1850s, Lloyd’s business model changed. Favoring news over fiction, he jettisoned Rymer, who in 1858 took up employment composing serials for Reynolds’s Miscellany, a penny periodical founded by the radical journalist and novelist George W. M. Reynolds. Some of Rymer’s serials of this period, such as the outlaw romances Edith the Captive, or the Robbers of Epping Forest (1861–1862) and its sequel Edith Heron, or the Earl and the Countess (1866), were issued in stand-alone editions by Reynolds’s regular publisher, John Dicks. Rymer also composed essays, short tales, and poetry and served as a periodical editor, including of two of Lloyd’s penny periodicals. Extremely private, he published for the most part anonymously, as “the author of” several of his bestselling penny bloods, and under a variety of pseudonyms, including the anagrams “Malcolm J. Errym” and “Malcolm J. Merry” and “Lady Clara Cavendish.” In the 20th century, while Sweeney Todd’s fame grew, Rymer was largely forgotten, in part because an apocryphal bibliographic tradition erroneously maintained that The String of Pearls and many of his other works were written by another Lloyd employee, Thomas Peckett Prest. Since the 1960s, scholarly interest in penny fiction has brought to light Rymer’s contemporaneous popularity, his complex aesthetics, his often liberal or radical politics, his profound impact on Victorian mass culture, and his work’s vibrant transmedia afterlives.

Falling birth rate in the capitalist countries of Western Europe

1935 ◽  
Vol 31 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 520-523
Author(s):  
F. G. Mukhamedyarov
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Birth Rate ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sharp Decline ◽  
The Social ◽  
Maternal Function ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Status Of Women

The beginning of a sharp decline in the birth rate in Europe dates back to the last quarter of the 19th century, the period of the heyday of capitalism, when the exploitation of the working class takes on the most refined forms, the contradiction between the social status of women and her maternal function appears sharper and brighter.

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