scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

Stan Orme and the road to ‘Industrial Democracy’: British attempts at the politicisation of working-class Protestants in Northern Ireland, 1973–75

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Craig
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Industrial Democracy ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
General Elections ◽  
The Uk

As Minister of State in Northern Ireland 1974-1976, Stanley Orme MP (1923-2005) worked at the heart of British government policies that attempted to ameliorate and politicise the membership of those loyalist groups that had successfully brought down the power sharing executive in 1974. Orme followed and extended a government policy of often secret engagement of those outside the mainstream of Northern Ireland politics; a policy that successfully brought about the Provisional IRA’s 1975 ceasefire, but which failed to bring the UVF into electoral politics with the dismal performance of the Volunteer Political Party in the 1974 general elections. Orme’s approach, outlined in the 1975 pamphlet ‘Industrial Democracy’ encouraged workers’ participation in the newly nationalised Harland and Wolff shipyard and was a direct attempt to politicise the Protestant working classes of Belfast. Orme attempted to redirect their support away from both existing militant and right-wing groups that at this time included the UDA, UVF and Ulster Vanguard. Orme’s view was that skilled industrial workers belonged within the fold of progressive social democracy and that the extension of government-backed syndicalist activity in the ship yard would empower the workers and help shift Northern Ireland as a whole from sectarian models of political activity to a class based system similar to the rest of the UK. For Orme, ‘Industrial Democracy’ was the ‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland’ and a potential solution to the province’s ills, ‘If the working-class people of Northern Ireland can be convinced that, whatever their religious denominations, they have economic interests in common, they will be able to approach the constitutional problem… with open minds.’ (‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland?’, [undated] c. 1975 LSE Orme 1/3). Using a combination of Orme’s official and private papers, this chapter seeks to explore and critique Orme’s motivation, his policy, and its effect.

Contraception and the Working Classes: The Social Ideology of the English Birth Control Movement in its Early Years

1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus McLaren
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Social Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
History Of

A host of social movements which had as their goal the improvement of the living conditions of the working classes emerged in England in the 1820s and 1830s. Owenism and Chartism come first to mind, but historians have recently acknowledged the social significance of a number of less well-known groups that proclaimed the benefits of temperance or mechanics' institutes or phrenology or infidel missions. The birth control movement in its early years has as yet received little attention from the historians of the English working classes. A possible reason is that the opposition of the 'pauper press' to the movement has led later observers to adopt the view that it was simply a middle-class Malthusian crusade which set out to convince the poor that the only escape from poverty lay in individual self-help. In what follows I shall sketch out the general lines of argument advanced by the advocates of birth control and their antagonists in the working-class movement. The purpose of the paper is not to provide yet another history of the first neo-Malthusians, but to use the arguments their activities elicited to gain a better understanding of nineteenth-century working-class culture.

Negotiating Mobility: Royal Dockyard Workers as Railway Excursion Agents and Social Entrepreneurs, 1880–1918

2021 ◽  
pp. 002252662110434
Author(s):  
Melanie Bassett
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Entrepreneur ◽  
Social Entrepreneurs ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Working People

From their creation in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain railway excursions provided working people with the means to expand their horizons and create new opportunities for identity- and money-making. This article explores the role of the social entrepreneur and their affect on social mobility. It also re-evaluates working-class leisure in the south of England and challenges the notion that the working-classes were not proactive in establishing their own unique commercial leisure cultures. Using a case study of two dockyard excursion enterprises, which were operated as sideline ventures by skilled artisans of the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK, the article will demonstrate how local working-class access to travel and cultural experiences were broadened and transformed through their initiatives and analyse the role and influence of these men on their co-workers and in wider society.

Working-Class Comic Book Heroes

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Galaxy

The Occupy Wall Street protests popularized the notion that “We are the 99 percent” mobilized against the political and economic interests of “the top 1%.” Some protestors wore Guy Fawkes masks in honor of the anarchist hero V, from Alan Moore’s comic book V for Vendetta. The 2016 United States Presidential election saw further evidence of populist unrest, with Democratic Primary candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican Party nominee Donald J. Trump making the economic fears of the beleaguered working- and middle-classes centerpieces of their campaigns. Since populist movements play an increasingly important role in global politics, it is important to consider how the often dismissed and demonized members of the working-classes are represented in popular culture. This book is about how these individuals – and the class conflicts they face in their daily lives – are depicted in comic books and their high-profile film and television adaptations. The essays in this book examine the horror-westerns The Walking Dead and Preacher, and the superhero comics Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Superpowered and non-superpowered comic book heroes provide a unique opportunity to reflect upon the emotionally charged issues surrounding “class” in a borderline safe space. The scholars who wrote these essays hope that, by discussing fictional working-class superheroes such as Spider-Man and Lois Lane in both an intellectual and entertaining manner, they will encourage more fruitful and enlightened ways of discussing vitally significant issues of wealth disparity and class identity in the real world.

scholarly journals A voice for the voiceless: Improving provenance practice for working-class books

2020 ◽  
pp. 096100062090916
Author(s):  
Lauren Alex O’Hagan
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Provenance Information ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Fair Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Three Stages

In recent years, libraries have become increasingly aware of the need to present a more diverse representation of society in their collections. While some efforts have been made to improve gender, race and sexuality representation, little attention has been paid to the working classes. The purpose of this research is to encourage a debate about the social class make-up of institutional collections and how fair representation and lack of diversity can be addressed. The research entails three stages: (1) Interviews with the 36 members of Research Libraries UK to investigate current challenges that prevent them from recording provenance information for working-class books; (2) The inclusive and fair cataloguing of the Janet Powney Collection – a working-class prize book collection in Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives; and (3) The organisation of impact and engagement events to promote the Janet Powney Collection. The study highlights that, while librarians face many challenges in terms of time, money and resources, as well as differences in guidelines and practices, the correct recording of provenance is essential in recovering the voices of working-class individuals, giving them agency as autonomous writers, and developing new narratives of working-class life and culture that challenge myths perpetuated by those in higher positions of power.

“Een stille, ongemanierde volksjongen”. Jos Verdegem (1897-1957), Wies Moens en “Ter Waarheid”

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
Stefan Van den Bossche
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Failure

Het menselijke tekort in het algemeen, het rampzalige van de oorlog, de sociale en  culturele aspecten van de Vlaamse beweging, het Vlaams kunstleven aan de IJzer, het activisme, het frontisme: al die geladen thema’s komen rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks aan bod in de bijdrage van Stefan Van den Bossche over Jos Verdegem (1897-1957). Deze minder bekende Gentse schilder uit het interbellum kwam eerst in nauwe betrekking met de expressionistische dichter en journalist Wies Moens en met andere vooraanstaande Vlaamsgezinde kunstenaars. Verdegems (tijdelijk) verblijf in Parijs en zijn huwelijk met een Française leidde er uiteindelijk toe dat hij vervreemde van het Vlaamsgezinde milieu. Daarenboven droegen zijn hoekige karaktereigenschappen er toe bij dat hij “eerder berucht dan beroemd” werd.________"A quiet, ill-mannered working-class lad". Jos Verdegem (1897-1957), Wies Moens and "Ter Waarheid"This contribution by Stefan Van den Bossche about Jos Verdegem (1897-1957) deals directly or indirectly with a variety of very meaningful topics such as human failure in general, the calamity of war, the social and cultural aspects of the Flemish movement, Flemish art life on the IJzer, activism, and frontism.This lesser-known painter from Ghent from the Interbellum period first came in close contact with the expressionist poet and journalist Wies Moens and with other prominent Flemish nationalist artists. Verdegem's (temporary) stay in Paris and his marriage to a Frenchwoman caused his ultimate estrangement from the Flemish nationalist environment. Moreover, his awkward characteristics contributed to his becoming "infamous rather than famous".

SISTEM PENDUKUNG KEPUTUSAN PRIORITAS LOKASI PERBAIKAN JALAN MENGGUNAKAN METODE AHP (ANALYICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS) DAN SAW (SIMPLE ADDITIVE WEIGHTING) STUDI KASUS KABUPATEN PASURUAN

Repositor ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feny Aries Tanti ◽  
Galih Wasis Wicaksono ◽  
Agus Eko Minarno
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Hierarchy Process ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
The Road ◽  
Regional Budget ◽  
Program Calculation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Position ◽  
Simple Additive Weighting ◽  
Hierarchy Process

AbstrakJalan merupakan prasarana yang ada di darat untuk sektor sosial dan ekonomi. Kesadaran pemerintah dalam memperbaiki jalan yang rusak merupakan hal utama dalam anggaran daerah. Peningkatan jumlah lokasi jalan berkaitan dengan peningkatan jumlah perbaikan jalan yang akan dilakukan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menentukan lokasi perbaikan jalan yang terbaik. Jalan yang diperbaiki berdasarkan dari beberapa alternatif posisi lokasi perbaikan jalan. Cara menetapkan lokasi perbaikan jalan dengan memberikan posisi peringkat alternatif berdasarkan kriteria yang sudah ditetapkan. Berdasarkan pertimbangan kriteria dapat diukur secara kuantitatif dengan menggunakan metode AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) dan SAW (Simple Additive Weighting). Berdasarkan hasil pengujian terhadap program sudah dapat digunakan. Hasil dari perhitungan program sudah sesuai dengan hasil perhitungan yang sudah dilakukan. Pengujian dilakukan terhadap 10 responden. Dengan sistem ini diharapkan membantu pihak Pekerjaan Umum (PU) Bina Marga untuk menentukan lokasi perbaikan jalan secara lebih objektif. Kata Kunci: Analytical Hierarchy Process, Simple Additive Weighting, Sistem Pendukung KeputusanAbstractThe road is a land-based infrastructure for the social and economic sectors. Government awareness in repairing a broken road is a key thing in a regional budget. The increasing number of road locations relates to the increasing number of road repairs to be made. The research aims to determine the location of the best road repairs. The repaired path is based off several alternative position of road repair location. How to set the road repair location by providing an alternate ranking position based on the criteria already set. Based on consideration criteria can be measured quantitatively by using AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) and SAW (Simple Additive Weighting). Based on the test results of the program can be used. The results of the program calculation are already in accordance with the calculated results. Testing was conducted against 10 respondents. This system is expected to assist the Public Works (PU) of Bina Marga to determine the location of road repairs in a more objective. Keyword: Analytical Hierarchy Process, Simple Additive Weighting, Decision Support System

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.

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