The Slum Question: The London County Council and Decent Dwellings for the Working Classes, 1880–1914

1973 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-325
Author(s):  
R. Vladimir Steffel
Keyword(s):  
County Council ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Proper Management ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Settlement Movement ◽  
East End ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Rural England

The middle classes, seduced by the gospels of growth and of laissezfaire, abandoned the older areas of London to the artisans and laborers, to the thousands of migrants from rural England, Scotland, and Ireland, and to Jewish immigrants from Russia. By 1880 the middle classes in the suburbs were isolated from the working classes and ignorant of their poverty. Then “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” by Andrew Mearns, the Pall Mall Gazette edited by W. T. Stead, and the writings of others exposing the squalor of the laboring classes led to a rediscovery of poverty. Many observers thought that charity would solve the problem, ome went slumming or joined the settlement movement begun at Toynbee Hall. Others, like Octavia Hill, were determined to improve the lives of the poor through the proper management and gradual upgrading of their living quarters. The philanthropic and semi-philanthropic dwellings companies such as the Peabody Trust, Guinness Trust, Improved Industrial Dwellings. East End Dwellings, and Four Percent Industrial Dwellings constructed new housing suitable for the working classes. All these efforts were limited because of the attitudes of the affluent classes toward the poor. Many believed that improvidence, intemperance, and licentiousness caused poverty and failed to realize that crowded living conditions and underemployment encouraged these vices. Beatrice Webb, who recognized this problem, wrote in her diary: “The Drink demon…undermines the constitution of a family.…There are times when one loses all faith in laisser faire [and] would suppress this poison at all hazards, before it eats the life of the nation.”

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

Sybil

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Disraeli
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich

Sybil, or The Two Nations is one of the finest novels to depict the social problems of class-ridden Victorian England. The book's publication in 1845 created a sensation, for its immediacy and readability brought the plight of the working classes sharply to the attention of the reading public. The ‘two nations’ of the alternative title are the rich and poor, so disparate in their opportunities and living conditions, and so hostile to each other. that they seem almost to belong to different countries. The gulf between them is given a poignant focus by the central romantic plot concerning the love of Charles Egremont, a member of the landlord class, for Sybil, the poor daughter of a militant Chartist leader.

Turning the Inside Out: Morals, Modes of Living, and the Condition of the Working Class

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
John B. Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Physical Condition ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Class Distinction

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.

scholarly journals Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-535
Author(s):  
Erdem Yörük ◽  
Alvaro Comin
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Systems Design ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Descriptive Statistical Analysis ◽  
Main Strategy

We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on descriptive statistical analysis, we argue that both PT and AKP failed to build multi-class bases and thus had to mobilize the poor by using various strategies, most importantly expanding social assistance policies, which accelerated the emergence of a new welfare state.

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

Inequality, Collective Action, and Democratization

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 661-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Keefer
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

Epic redistributive struggles between the rich and poor lie at the heart of prominent theories of economic development and the emergence of democracy (e.g., Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). The poor pursue democracy to secure credible redistribution away from wealthy elites; elites, fearing redistribution, but also the costs of revolution, decide whether to repress these efforts or to surrender to them. These theories, and the historical examples of working classes exacting redistributive or political concessions from elites, have been interpreted as suggesting that inequality and redistributive struggles should be central features of development and democratization. Where inequality is high, democracy should be unlikely to emerge, or to emerge and be unstable. Because elites in unequal societies are unwilling to adopt institutions that encourage growth and investment (such as institutions that protect non-elites from predation by elites), incomes should be lower as well.

Abandoned Being: The Aesthetic of Inhabiting in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-344
Author(s):  
Clare Callahan
Keyword(s):  
Living Conditions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Socioeconomic Structures

This article reads the vocabulary of “being” scattered throughout Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl as exposing the ontological dispossession underlying the economic and political abandonment of the poor. The Girl’s search for a way “to be,” however, also disrupts the economy of representation by which the state monitors and assesses, through a rhetoric of uplifted subjectivity, the behaviors of the women who depend on state relief programs. In The Girl, homeless women’s discovery of forms of being within precarious living conditions constitutes an ontological repossession through which Le Sueur imagines alternative feminist socioeconomic structures and, by extension, alternative forms of subjectivity that emerge within subrepresentational spaces.

A divided city

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-184
Author(s):  
Alice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholics

Belfast’s middle classes lived in a divided city. Politically, Belfast was divided for the period under review into Conservative and Liberal camps. Religious divisions existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and within Protestantism itself. Society was also separated into different classes, with the middle classes positioned above the working classes and below the aristocracy. Political, religious and class tensions existed in every industrial city, of course. However, in Belfast, religious division assumed a particularly ugly and bitter hue. This chapter focuses on an elite living in a society divided along lines of both class and religion. The relationship of Belfast’s elite to the city’s working classes and the local aristocracy is explored; while a discussion of Belfast’s middle-class Roman Catholic community assesses the extent to which it was integrated into the city’s elite. The chapter also examines the relationship between the middle classes and the city’s growing sectarianism.

‘Twenty girls in my attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Settlement Movement ◽  
Spiritual Conversion ◽  
East End

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.

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