From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 187-202
Author(s):  
Vicky Cheng ◽  
Haejoo Kim
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
East End ◽  
Walter Besant ◽  
Liberal Thought

This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.

The Making of a Working-Class Suburb in Hamilton's East End, 1900-1945

1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Harrs ◽  
Mast Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
East End

Whitechapel Boy

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-74
Author(s):  
Chris Searle
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Forthcoming Book ◽  
East End

Excerpts are provided here from a forthcoming book to mark the centenary of the poet Isaac Rosenberg, who died in France on the Western Front in 1918. The author, who was able to interview Rosenberg’s contemporary Joseph Leftwich, explains Rosenberg’s experiences of anti-Semitism, including in the army, and his roots in London’s working-class, Jewish East End.

scholarly journals Claude McKay, The Workers' Dreadnought, and collaborative poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Arts ◽  
East End ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Holistic Representation

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

HAMILTON'S EAST END: THE EARLY WORKING-CLASS SUBURB

1992 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Harris ◽  
Matthew P. Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
East End

An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s

Race & Class ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Harcup
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
Pedagogy Of The Oppressed ◽  
The Creation ◽  
East End ◽  
Community Publishing

From 1971 to 1976, Chris Searle was at the centre of a number of events in the East End of London that, nearly four decades on, continue to resonate. This article uses a combination of reminiscence, reflection, contemporaneous and retrospective accounts, and engagement with the writings of Searle himself, to explore the meanings of the ‘Stepney Words insurrection’ and the creation of the Basement Writers. The article is informed by ideas of critical literacy, including Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, and argues that community publishing can be seen as an expression of working-class agency and active citizenship within an alternative or ‘plebeian public sphere’.

The Oriental and the Music Hall: Sound and Space in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
East End ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Sax Rohmer

Dr Fu Manchu has proved the most enduring of the chinoiserie associated with Limehouse, however, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the space of Chinatown, rather than the representation of any one individual. It begins with a brief consideration of the Limehouse lair created for Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, before focusing attention on the less remembered but once infamous literary chinoiserie of Thomas Burke. In particular, it examines the depiction of sound and music in his early works, and their utilisation in the construction of a Chinatown which was enmeshed within the wider East End, and whose Oriental practices intersected with Victorian music hall. In his combination of ancient Chinese melodies and pre-commercialised music hall, Burke assigned his Chinatown and East End to a previous era, his Limehouse was separated from the rest of London by time, as well as race and class. Although Burke in one sense offers Chinatown as a nostalgic alternative to the encroachment of the modern state and bourgeois culture, he also depicts it as a brutal slum where murder and suicide were commonplace. Burke’s subtly subversive chinoserie oscillates between negative and positive constructions of his synthesis of Victorian working-class and Chinese culture.

The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Kevin Swafford
Keyword(s):  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
East End ◽  
Walter Besant

In All Sorts and Conditions of Men Walter Besant focuses his novelistic gaze on what he perceived as the neglected “romance” and “possibilities” of the East End of London (as opposed to its more horrific and tragic realities), and famously forwarded a utopian, “cultural solution” to the apparently mind-numbing monotony of East End existence. What is generally missed in the critical approaches to All Sorts and Conditions of Men are the subtle ways in which Besant’s socio-cultural “focus” (the respectable, but dull and neglected East End) and “solution” (cultural philanthropy and paternalistic economic relations) reflect Besant’s attempt to work through and elaborate a kind of relational and perspectival ethics through the generic hybridity (and perhaps, ultimately, limitations) of an “urban romance.”

A tale of two cities: The discursive construction of ‘place’ in gentrifying East London

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Christian Ilbury
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Place Attachment ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
East End ◽  
Construction Of Place ◽  
The City

Abstract In recent years, the East End of London has been dramatically transformed from a poor, working-class area, to one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods in the world. Adding to a growing body of research which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of gentrifying neighbourhoods, this article draws on data from two ethnographic projects to examine how young people from the gentrified (i.e. working-class) and gentrifier (i.e. middle-class) communities index place attachment in East London. I demonstrate that for the gentrified community, place attachment is related to the ethnic and cultural genealogy of the immediate, local neighbourhood. Whilst for the gentrifiers, place identity is associated with the cosmopolitan economic and social opportunities of the city. I argue that whilst these communities occupy the same physical neighbourhood, these discourses suggest that they conceptually and socioculturally reside in two very different cities. (Gentrification, place, space, East London)*

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