A Voice for Slaves

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Slave System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Peculiar Nature

This article examines the office of the Fiscal in Berbice (later British Guiana) between 1819 and 1834—a period encompassing amelioration and emancipation. It looks in particular at the lives and concerns of enslaved women as revealed in an extraordinary set of slave testimonies collected as part of the Fiscal’s duties. It outlines the peculiar nature of the Office of the Fiscal and how it allowed enslaved women a voice to complain about aspects of their treatment under slavery in a particularly harsh slave regime. It connects this office also to a developing ideology of “protection” to be extended to non-whites in the British Empire in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Using the concept of “moral economy” as developed many years ago by E.P. Thompson to analyse early nineteenth-century British working class culture and as extended by Emilia Viotta Da Costa to Demerara and Berbice, it suggests that enslaved women had clear expectations of what could be rightfully expected of them and what were unjust demands within a slave system designed to keep enslaved women in their place.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Subsequent Growth ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
The Uk

In common with its companion volume - Soldiers as Workers – Class, employment, conflict and the nineteenth century military (2016), this study argues that class is the primary means of understanding the topic. Focusing on rank and file soldiers it concludes that they were not a separate caste. Instead, soldiering was often just a phase in civilian working lives. The nineteenth century was overshadowed by the mass mobilisation required for the generation-long French Wars and concurrent Industrial Revolution, with emerging working-class popular politics. The chapter reviews developing working class literacy and subsequent growth of rank and file memoirs, which are an important source for this study. The chapter stresses the importance of the new barrack system in the UK and the growth of British Empire, both of which had profound consequences for British society.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Hannah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

This book ends in 1750 but its preoccupations can be traced into the early nineteenth century. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars against France between 1793 and 1815 saw two decades of warfare. Fears of popular revolution dominated the 1790s and 1800s, with radical groups being fiercely suppressed. The government’s concern over radical politics and the politics of class extended to the army. It was remarked that military service abroad had led to soldiers becoming vehement democrats; troops were even alleged to have been reading that working-class radical text ...

scholarly journals Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Somers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

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