scholarly journals The Class of 1838: A Social History of the First Victorian Novelists

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Riddell ◽  
Troy J. Bassett

To what extent does an individual’s background, specifically their age, gender, and socio-economic background predict their becoming a novelist? Questions of this genre have been with us as long as the novel has been an object of study. Using new data, biographical details of every writer who published a novel in 1838 in the British Isles, we revisit the question of the relationship between social background and novel writing. Novelists in this cohort tend to emerge disproportionately from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds—83% of novelists come from non-working-class backgrounds. We also find that that men novelists are significantly more likely than women novelists to write under a name other than their legal name. The comprehensive data on the “Class of 1838” made available here supports systematic study of the social history of novel writing, offering a replacement for existing opportunistic convenience samples of questionable reliability.

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McMurry

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?


Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.


1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 65-98
Author(s):  
Gordon Fyfe

This paper is a critique of the contribution of William Ivins's Prints and Visual Communication (1953) to an understanding of the meaning of fine art reproductions. Ivins showed that photographic reproduction was constructed in relation to, and displaced, older ways of reproducing art which were carried out by handicraft engravers. His analysis alerts us to the fact that ambiguity characterized art reproduction before photographs. Art reproductions, then, were interpretations in line based on conventional modes of representation – what Ivins calls a visual syntax. In this respect he enhances our understanding of the social construction of the artist. For Ivins the social history of reproduction seems to end with the camera. This completed an individuation of creativity ushered in with the Renaissance, but which was always qualified by the interfering visual syntax of craftsmen-interpreters. It is argued that the value of Ivins's account resides in its reconstruction of the relationship between handicraft engraving, fine art reproduction and aesthetic objects that have long since slipped from our consciousness.


1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith J. Hurwich

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.


2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin S. Fridy ◽  
Victor Brobbey

ABSTRACTThere is a common perception in Ghana that Accra Hearts of Oak is the soccer club of the National Democratic Congress, and Kumasi Asante Kotoko that of the New Patriotic Party. In this paper we explore the roots of these perceptions by examining the social history of these two clubs specifically, and the Ghanaian soccer league system in general, with an eye for the actors, practices and events that injected political airs into purportedly ‘apolitical’ athletic competitions. With this social history clearly defining the popularly perceived ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of the Hearts/Kotoko rivalry, we analyse on the basis of a modest survey some of the assumptions these widely held stereotypes rely upon. We find that ethnicity and location matter both in terms of predicting one's affinity for a given soccer club and partisan inclinations. These factors do not, however, completely dispel the relationship between sports and politics as spurious. Though not conclusive, there is enough evidence collected in the survey to suggest that one's preferred club, even when controlling for ethnicity and location, does have an effect on one's partisan leanings, or perhaps vice versa. This finding highlights the independent role that often-understudied cultural politics can play.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-153
Author(s):  
Anna Triayudha ◽  
Rateh Ninik Pramitasary ◽  
Hermansyah Akbar Anas ◽  
Choirul Mahfud

The growth and development of Islamic Education is inseparable from the growth of institutions. The Prophet made it happen by establishing institutions that had a role in developing and advancing Islamic education, one of which was a mosque. Research on the relationship of mosques with the social history of Islamic education is discussed by using descriptive qualitative methods that are oriented to literature review. This paper shows that in the early period of Islamic education, the Prophet provided exemplary by building and empowering mosques. The example of the Prophet continued with the Caliphs afterwards until the present era. The mosque was built by the Prophet from the Al Haram mosque located in Makkah, Quba Mosque located in Quba, Nabawi mosque located in Medina and so on. The role and function of the mosque at that time was as a place of prayer, a place of prayer, a place for discussion or deliberation, a meeting place to develop a war strategy and others related to the problems and needs of Muslims. From time to time, the role or function of the mosque has changed slightly. In essence, mosques are currently influencing the development of the social history of Islamic education in Indonesia.


1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 125-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.C. McCaskie

There is a considerable literature dealing with the phemenon of twentieth-century anti-witchcraft cults among the Akan peoples of Ghana, and notably the Asante. This literature is written from the disciplinary perspective of social anthropology and it may be divided into two interpretative views of the matter. The first espouses the theory that such cults are ‘new’--creations of the twentieth century--in that they represent a reflexive response to the social disorientation assumed to have been engendered by colonial overrule. The second questions the causative link between the twentieth century and increased anomie, and suggests the location of such cults in a time perspective reaching back into the distant--but undefined--pre-colonial past. For a social historian interested in the problem of witchcraft and its suppression this literature presents a resistant difficulty. It concerns itself with the material appurtenances and the impressionistic ‘psychohistory’ of cult practices, but it is almost entirely bereft of historical data and it indulges in generalizations erected upon the flimsiest of factual considerations. McLeod, who has ably reviewed this literature, has commented upon this deficiency with regret, but--at least so far--has done little to rectify it.In this paper I am concerned with the discrete history--social, economic and political--of three important anti-witchcraft cults that flourished in Asante between the late 1870s adn the late 1920s; in chronological order these were, domankama (‘The Creator’), aberewa (‘The Old Woman’) and hwe me so (‘Watch Over Me’). In discussing these cults as historical phenomena I seek to explicate or otherwise to dissolve some of the generalizations evident in the existing literature. I seek too to say something concerning the construction of a valid Asante (and African) social history, the relationship between social history and social anthropology in the African context, and the significance for the historian of Africa of socio-cultural phenomena such as witchcraft.


Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Alex Ciorogar ◽  
Jessica Brenda Codină ◽  
Alex Văsieș ◽  
Vlad Pojoga ◽  
Ștefan Baghiu ◽  
...  

A post-anthropocentric epistemological assemblage becomes indispensable in the investigation of the ecology of the Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences, thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects, such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy, thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity.


Hawwa ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-347
Author(s):  
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf

AbstractThis essay presents a woman whose ideas not only signifies a challenge to conventional approaches to the relationship between colonialism and feminism, but also enables us to appreciate the intricacies and diversities of colonial experiences and the multiple roles played by individuals who wielded some level of authority in a colonised society. Since this essay is a tribute to Ina Beasley, it reproduces substantial excerpts from her papers on the subjects that engaged her most deeply during her Sudan service. Her writings shed new light on the social history of human rights during the Condominium, which matters both to scholars and to concerned citizens. In recognition of Ina Beasley, who devoted her life to improving the lives of women and children in a society rife with hardship and discriminatory practices, the essay addresses her work on education and its relevance to eradicating female circumcision that was universally practiced at the time. The essay begins with a brief discussion of Sudanese politics at the time of her arrival and then examines her work as educator who managed to craft several influential programs to empower women and girls. The rest of the paper focuses on her reproductive health advocacy as exemplified in a formidable body of work that articulated her activities and approaches to social rights.


Author(s):  
David Allan

This chapter studies how novels circulate among readers between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The circulation of texts was plainly central to the broader culture of this period as well as to the social history of its literature. In fact, it performed many important functions in a rapidly changing environment. The mechanisms employed provided ample opportunities for sociability, for the cultivation and display of politeness, and even for genuine philanthropy. They also gave scope for the determined pursuit of self-improvement, for personal education, and, not least, for deep inward satisfaction. In all of this the novel was a crucial factor—helping, as it also benefited from, these vital transformational processes. Above all, its extraordinary cultural and commercial success between 1750 and 1820 confirms much about the scale and sophistication of the methods by which texts were now becoming available to readers.


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