Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The Proletarian Child Strikes Back

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dafna Zur
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Working Class ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Transnational Connections

This chapter explores children’s literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that content and form be merged to better capture the child-heart. Proletarian writers wrote against the bourgeois child-heart and translated it into a moral instinct and outrage over the exploitation of the working class. These writers, many of whom went on to become prominent literary figures in North Korea, sought to create a child-heart that, unlike the angelic disposition of its bourgeois counterpart, was fueled by resentment and choreographed action. Noting the transnational connections with proletarian cultures in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this chapter examines the content and language of leftist writing and points to emerging developments in children’s literature that spilled over into the formative period of 1950s North Korea, which became home to many of the prominent writers and illustrators active in the mid-twenties and thirties.

Karl Marx's Vision of America: A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch

1980 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-503
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
New Era ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Made In

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

My Little Girl Wife

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Minor Children ◽  
Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

Philosophy for Children

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Kidd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Philosophy For Children ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Matthew Lipman

Emphasizing the contributions of Matthew Lipman and Gareth Matthews, Chapter 1 examines the P4C movement, which promotes the idea that both children and children’s literature have philosophical tendencies. For P4C, to think philosophically means to think both critically and creatively. This vision of philosophy aligns with a similar understanding of theory. P4C got its start in the United States and has since spread to other countries and continents. At one point there were reportedly 5,000 P4C programs in the United States alone. P4C is enjoying a recent resurgence and continues to be influential worldwide. Chapter 1 examines the evolving use of children’s literature in P4C, as a way of understanding the mutualities of children’s literature and philosophy. P4C has helped to establish children’s literature as philosophical and ethical engagement, linking it with progressive education and children’s rights. It promises also to keep philosophy fresh for practitioners and the larger public. Contemporary PwC (philosophy with children) gives priority to the use of picturebooks.

Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter considers cross-dressed roles in nineteenth-century music-theatrical forms in the United States, and particularly in non-narrative and semi-narrative forms such as minstrelsy, circus, variety, and burlesque. It discusses the origins of cross-dressed roles in English theatrical traditions, as well as connections to similar roles in European opera and operetta. It also considers other kinds of performances present in variety that challenged middle class gender construction of the period, and suggests that variety represented working class gender roles, and humor was found at the expense of hegemonic middle class ideals. This becomes particularly clear in the performances by male impersonators in variety of the 1860s–1880s. By the end of the century the middle class had expanded to include portions of the variety audience, and audiences no longer found the satirical treatment of middle class men funny. This, and growing mainstream recognition of homosexual populations, particularly in urban areas, caused the decline of cross-dressed performance.

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