scholarly journals ‘What a Wonderful Change Have I Undergone…So Altered in Stature, Knowledge & Ideas!’: Apprenticeship, Adolescence and Growing Up in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ulster

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period. A study of apprenticeship not only tells us how young people learned the skills with which they made their future living, it also casts light on the process of ‘growing up’. However, we still know little about the everyday lives of apprentices, their relationships with their masters, and how young people themselves understood the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing largely on the diary of John Tennent (1772–1813), a grocer’s apprentice who kept a record of his time spent in service, this article aims to broaden our understanding of these themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. It demonstrates that, for young middle-class men like Tennent, apprenticeship played a key role in the transition from boy to manhood.

Kafka, Franz (1883–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Langlois
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Language And Identity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Training

Franz Kafka was born 3 July 1883 to a bourgeois family in Prague, the Czech capital that in the late nineteenth century belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although his nationality was therefore Austro-Hungarian, Kafka’s parents, Hermann Kafka and Julie Lowy were Jewish, and under the reign of Franz Josef I, Austrian Jews were widely regarded as second-class citizens. As head of a Jewish family growing up in Czech-speaking Prague, Hermann Kafka strongly insisted that his children be raised to speak and act German, the de facto language and identity of social and cultural prestige in Prague during this period. While Kafka exhibited a keen interest in literature and art from a very young age, his notoriously overbearing father was insistent that he should receive education and training for a professional or administrative career, which would allow him to provide his future family with the same level of upper-middle class affluence that Hermann had provided for Franz. Kafka reluctantly capitulated, and on 18 June 1906 he successfully completed a Doctorate in Law from the Ferdinand-Karls University in Prague.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyce Rotella ◽  
George Alter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Life Cycle Patterns ◽  
Near Future

Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in deficit could expect larger contributions from children in the near future. These patterns suggest that families used borrowing and saving to smooth consumption over the life-cycle as the earning capacity of the family changed.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Tobias Harper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Basic Ethnography at the Barricades

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nefissa Naguib
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Immolation

We did not see them growing up. We did not think these jaded middle-class boys and girls would one day be resilient and hold their ground. We did not realize that they would be brave, supremely articulate, and driven by aspirations beyond our dreams. The whole thing started with the desperate act of self-immolation by a young Tunisian man. His death sparked a wave of rage against poverty, social exclusion, and corruption. Almost overnight, young men and women created spaces in squares, streets, and alleys where we could imagine new Arab countries. Enraged yet nonviolent, they used technology and the vocabulary of democracy to connect and mobilize ordinary Arab citizens of all walks of life and capture the attention of the world. In Egypt, Tahrir Square became the epicenter of the people's demands for bread, dignity, and social justice. Without leaders or a timetable, but with unconditional demands for immediate change, online activists provided us with physical and social grounds to imagine a new country. We all brought something to the square: blood, medicines, bandages, food, water, blankets, generators, diapers, mobile-phone chargers, garbage bags, wipes, and our own personal notes to the regime (and the world) written in bold letters. Mine just said: “Leave.”

Recognizing Lincoln

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara A. Finnegan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines how viewers in the late nineteenth century made sense of a photograph of Abraham Lincoln, published by McClure's magazine thirty years after his assassination. Revealed to the American public in 1895, nearly five decades after its creation, the daguerreotype reproduction featured a Lincoln few had seen before: a thirty-something, well-groomed, middle-class gentleman. In order to understand viewers' readings of the Lincoln portrait, the chapter investigates portrait photography in relation to the discourses of phrenology and physiognomy. It shows that viewers treated the Lincoln portrait as a vehicle for the exploration of its subject's character. Based on their responses, the viewers saw in the image not only a Lincoln they recognized physically but one whose psychology and morality they recognized as well. Those who composed responses to the McClure's photograph tapped into powerful myths about Lincoln that circulated during the late nineteenth century.

scholarly journals The ‘Gluttonous Child’ Narrative in Italy and Britain: A Transnational Analysis

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gasperini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Child Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Child Nutrition ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract This article compares images of food as temptation, and hunger as test, in two samples of late-nineteenth century British and Italian children’s literature. It reads the narratives alongside coeval popular medical manuals on child health, examining recurring descriptions of children as natural gluttons in works dedicated to child nutrition. Putting the select fiction and non-fiction in dialogue with moral, scientific, and nation-building middle-class discourses circulating in both countries, the article finds that the ‘gluttonous child’ narrative was both transnational and transtextual.

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