Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire: Rituals of Solidarity

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Symbolic Expression ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Distinguished Career ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Northern Star

In 1869 William Aitken looked back over a long and distinguished career as a radical activist in the Lancashire factory town of Ashton-under-Lyne. In a letter to the Ashton Reporter, he recalled his introduction to the ranks of radicalism: “My earliest remembrances of taking a part in Radicalism are the invitations I used to receive to be at ‘Owd’ Nancy Clayton's in Charlestown, on the 16th of August to denounce the Peterloo Massacre, to drink in solemn silence ‘To the immortal memory of Henry Hunt’.…” In November 1838 the Northern Star, Chartism's great newspaper, made what would appear to be the first mention of Aitken's public role in radical politics. The twenty-four year-old Aitken, former piecer and cotton spinner turned school master, attended a dinner held in the working-class suburb of Charlestown at the home of John and Nancy Clayton to commemorate the birthday of the hero of Peterloo fields.

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?

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’.

Henry Bence-Jones, M. D. , F. R. S. (1813-1873)

1973 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Diagnosis And Treatment ◽  
Animal Tissues ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Chemical Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
To Receive

Many leading nineteenth-century physicians recognized the need to reduce the empirical element in medicine and to base both diagnosis and treatment more firmly upon scientific principles. In an age when chemistry was a rapidly developing science it seemed that animal chemistry, dealing with the materials and functions of living organisms, might well offer the best solution to the problem. Thus the development of the subject for medical purposes became one of the main objectives of animal chemists, although from hindsight it is clear that neither the techniques nor the chemical knowledge available were at all adequate for solving the complex problems involved. Yet chemists like Fourcroy and Berzelius tried to understand the chemistry of life and their results seemed to support the widely held view that a knowledge of the composition of animal tissues, together with an understanding of the natural functions in health, would aid medical diagnosis and treatment by exposing the faults present in disease. In early nineteenth-century England there was a lively interest in this subject (I) and some physicians became very successful in applying chemical principles to medicine, but despite the evident value of animal chemistry the novelty of the subject caused medical schools to be reluctant to introduce it into their curricula. Medical students continued to receive instruction in the classics but the physical sciences were frequently neglected.

scholarly journals ‘An Unnatural Crime’: Infanticide in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Previous Investigation ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Sharp Rise ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Taking Care

Infanticide reached record levels in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the rising population and increasing poverty provided the essential precondition for this, the sharp rise in the practice identified by contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s might not have taken place had the Dublin and Cork Foundling Hospitals continued to assume responsibility for the care of foundling children. But once they were no longer available to receive them, the women who give birth to the children that society identified as illegitimate chose to terminate their lives in record numbers in an attempt to avoid the severe stigma that this brought and the practical difficulties of taking care of a child alone. Using the cases that came before the coroners court and the crime figures assembled by the Royal Irish Constabulary from the 1830s, this article combines the quantitative analysis of the practice that this permits with a reliance on the qualitative approach that informed a previous investigation of the phenomenon in the eighteenth century to track its evolving trajectory, to identify its main features and to explain how it had arrived at a point by the 1840s when it exceeded homicide as the primary cause of violent death.

scholarly journals Melodrama and the ‘art of government’: Jewish Emancipation and Elizabeth Polack’s Esther, the Royal Jewess; or The Death of Haman!

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Jo Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Low Expectations ◽  
Political Value

This article challenges historians’ representations of working-class Jewish attitudes to emancipation in the early nineteenth century through a reading of Elizabeth Polack’s 1835 melodrama, Esther, the Royal Jewess, or the Death of Haman! Low expectations of working-class political engagement and the working-class genre of the melodrama are challenged by the astute political content of Polack’s play. Its historical and political value is revealed by placing the play within the tradition of the purimspiel, the Jewish genre that traditionally explores Jewish life under hostile government. Reading the play alongside Walter Benjamin’s writings on the disparaged German melodramatic genre of the trauerspiel enables a finely articulated reading of its complex exploration of issues of sovereignty, law, and religious and political freedom.

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