Pets, People, and the Enduring ‘Dogaturgy’ of Nineteenth-Century Dog Dramas

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-233
Author(s):  
Amy E. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Attitudinal Change ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Shed Light

Dogs began playing new roles as emotional companions in Eurowestern households during the mid-1800s; by the 1880s, dogs were widely considered ‘family members’ in middle-class homes. The nineteenth-century ‘dog drama’, a type of melodrama, helps illuminate how, when, and why this attitudinal change occurred. The transatlantic appeal of dog dramas (such as René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's 1814 melodrama The Dog of Montargis) and performers who specialised in the genre (such as U.S. actor-entrepreneur Edwin Blanchard) suggest that sentimental stories about dogs appealed to working-class people as well. These plays reflected, and perhaps contributed to, changing views about dogs during the nineteenth century. The dog drama and its afterlives (in film, television, and social media) shed light on both the good intentions and troubling contradictions inherent in humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals, especially pets.

My Little Girl Wife

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Minor Children ◽  
Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

The Garibaldi Riots Of 1862

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Age Of Revolution

Violence is the means of expression of men who lack any other, and is especially useful to the historian of an otherwise inarticulate working class, starving on die scraps which middle-class sources leave him. Everyman is anonymous, but becomes memorable in rebellion; and in die many memorable rebellions of nineteenth-century Europe, that self-proclaimed ‘age of revolution’, historians have rejoiced that trie poor had found voice in violence.

scholarly journals Social Media Causing Communication Gap: A Study of Middle-Class Families in Latifabad, Hyderabad, Pakistan

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Rashid Ali Khuhro ◽  
Bashir Memon ◽  
Rabia Wahid
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Family Communication ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
The Family ◽  
Communication Gap ◽  
Middle Class Families

In family communication, the effective communication stands as the base of strong relations among the family members. However, a little gap in communication weakens family relationships and creates severe problems. Like all types of advanced communication channels; the advent of social media has also facilitated the effectiveness of interface among people. Although, social media's instantaneous communication process ended the communication gap among masses. Thus, many scholars believed that it has also created a communication gap among humans, especially in family communication. In this way, this study aimed to examine the communication gap created by social media among middle-class families of sub-division Latifabad Sindh, Pakistan. The researchers adopted a focus group discussion technique to collect data from three middle-class families. The result of this study shows that most of the focus group participants prefer communication in interpersonal communication settings. Further, it reveals that the majority of the family members use social media by smartphone, tabs and laptops. Significantly, the findings of this study emerged that social media creates a communication gap among middle-class families of Latifabad Hyderabad, Sindh –Pakistan.

Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter considers cross-dressed roles in nineteenth-century music-theatrical forms in the United States, and particularly in non-narrative and semi-narrative forms such as minstrelsy, circus, variety, and burlesque. It discusses the origins of cross-dressed roles in English theatrical traditions, as well as connections to similar roles in European opera and operetta. It also considers other kinds of performances present in variety that challenged middle class gender construction of the period, and suggests that variety represented working class gender roles, and humor was found at the expense of hegemonic middle class ideals. This becomes particularly clear in the performances by male impersonators in variety of the 1860s–1880s. By the end of the century the middle class had expanded to include portions of the variety audience, and audiences no longer found the satirical treatment of middle class men funny. This, and growing mainstream recognition of homosexual populations, particularly in urban areas, caused the decline of cross-dressed performance.

Developing Autonomy for Tellers, Tales, and Telling in Family Narrative Events

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoshana Blum-Kulka ◽  
Catherine E. Snow
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Dinner Table ◽  
Family Constellation ◽  
Family Narrative ◽  
The Family ◽  
American Children ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Middle Class Families

Abstract Dinner-table conversations are contexts in which children become socialized to local cultural rules regulating storytelling and may be able to achieve autonomy in telling stories, as tellers of stories, and in the content or tale recounted. Conversations from five American and five Israeli middle-class families and five American working-class families matched on family constellation generated 33, 40, and 15 narratives, respectively. Each of the groups demonstrated a different pattern on dimensions such as who participated in telling narratives, who initi-ated narratives, and how secondary narrators participated; Israeli family narra-tives were more collaborative but with relatively little child participation, whereas American middle-class children participated more by initiating their own narratives and American working-class children narrated in response to adult elicitation. All three groups demanded fidelity to truth and coherence in the tales children told, but many more of the narratives told in Israeli families had to do with events known to all the family members, whereas American children told stories about events unfamiliar to at least some family members. (Communication)

MANUFACTURING ACCIDENT: INDUSTRIALISM AND THE WORKER’S BODY IN EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-329
Author(s):  
Mike Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Fiction

I refer to the health of millions who spend their lives in manufactories. . . I ask if these millions enjoy that vigour of body which is ever a direct good, and without which all other advantages are comparatively worthless? (The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health andlongevity, C. Turner Thackrah) [Factory reformers] wrote in the newspapers, and circulated pamphlets - they petitioned Parliament - exhibited diseased and crippled objects in London - and made such an impression on the public mind, that their measures were carried in the House of Commons almost by acclamation, notwithstanding the testimony of facts of a directly contrary nature. (Exposition of the Factory Question)THIS ARTICLE SEEKS to explore the significance of the injured working-class body in debates about the nature and meaning of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 It will argue that a growing awareness that the comforts of middle-class existence depended on processes that maimed working-class lives was profoundly unsettling to the bourgeois conscience as it threatened one of its most important narratives of legitimation. Finally, it will trace the emergence of the “accident” (as both concept and fictional trope) as a response to and resolution of this ideological crisis.

THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER RE(AD)DRESSED: JENNY WREN'S CRITIQUE OF CHILDHOOD, FEMININITY, AND APPEARANCE

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Initial Assumption ◽  
True Description ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
Wealthy Women

Of all Dickens's eccentric children – whose numbers include the Artful Dodger, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, and Smike – none, perhaps, is more peculiarly “old-fashioned” than Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). From her first appearance, Jenny exhibits a strange indeterminacy: A parlour door within a small entry stood open, and disclosed a child – a dwarf – a girl – a something – sitting on a little low old-fashioned arm-chair, which had a kind of little working bench before it.“I can't get up,” said the child, “because my back's bad, and my legs are queer. But I'm the person of the house.” (222; bk. 2, ch.1) This description of Jenny cannot settle. The initial assumption that she is a child is placed in doubt as she becomes, in quick succession, a “dwarf,” a “girl,” a “something.” It is left to her to define how she should be perceived, but the phrase she chooses – “the person of the house” – only compounds the confusion. Throughout this article I follow the spirit of this passage. Rather than pursuing a “true” description of Jenny Wren, I offer a reading that puts her indeterminacy centre-stage, along with her job as a “dolls’ dressmaker” for wealthy women. In her appearance, her work, and her language, I argue, Jenny calls into question how gender and child/adult identities are constructed in nineteenth-century society, both in her own working-class milieu, where she is taunted by local children (224; bk. 2, ch. 1), and in the fashionable upper- and middle-class world to whose whims she caters. In addition, I draw upon Thomas Carlyle's novel Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and the work of Walter Benjamin to suggest that Jenny's satirical and playful use of words constitutes a philosophical critique of the mutability of appearance in mid-nineteenth-century modernity.

scholarly journals ‘Noisy, restless and incoherent’: puerperal insanity at Dundee Lunatic Asylum

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morag Allan Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Patient Case ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Way

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere.

“BRIGHT GLANCES” OR “CLEVER HANDS”? THE DOMESTIC IMAGE OF WORKING-CLASS WOMEN IN ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-chuan Yan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
The Family ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Holy Place

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.

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