Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Differentiation ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Cultural Displacement ◽  
Moral System ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Middle-class Cubans in the nineteenth century had developed the capacity to admire themselves, a self-assurance inscribed in the very ethos by which an emerging social class advanced its claim to ascendancy. These developments implied a heightened confidence in the authority to act in common in the pursuit of collective interests: developments occurring at a time when the propriety of Cuban was gaining currency as a matter of cultural displacement and moral deportment, when pretensions to being a separate people were enacted through multiple forms of social differentiation. Successive generations of Cubans had crossed into new realms of self-awareness, in part political, to be sure, but also moral and cultural, reaching deeply into those interior spaces where a people accept as a matter of a shared conviction the need to exert their claim to agency and exercise the prerogative of choice as a way to situate themselves as subjects of history in narratives of their own making. The habit of volition had taken hold as a facet of far-reaching cultural shifts, a deepening consciousness of the authority of agency within an emerging moral system formed to accommodate the cosmology of Cuban....

Character

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 21-83
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Urban Economy ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
History Of

“Character” is often studied as the deep psychological self crafted by the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet Chapter 1 proposes an alternative history of character by looking to caricature, in some of the earliest comics (“Galleries of Comicalities”) appearing in sporting newspapers in the 1830s. Early caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized, especially in depictions of “the cockney,” the urban mischief-man whose subversive masculinity reflected the economic pressures of the new urban economy. Cartoons featuring the cockney were anti-authoritarian, carnivalesque, and often laced with crude racism and misogyny. Their mock-violent energy gave voice to some of the explosive frustration felt by working- and lower-middle-class men after the failures of the Reform Bill of 1832. The young Charles Dickens borrowed many of his earliest subjects from extant caricature motifs, reflecting some of the fundamental instabilities of social class and economic precarity defining the Reform Era.

“The Great Middle Class” in the Nineteenth-Century United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Marcus Gräser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
The Core ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

This chapter shows that in America the middle class has historically been more than just a diverse group of middling sorts. In self-awareness as well as in the descriptions made by foreign observers, the middle classes after the eighteenth century appeared as embodiments of the new society that had developed in the colonies of settlers on North American soil. This resulted not least from the fact that typical elements of European societies—above all the aristocracy but also the clergy as a separate estate—were absent. Since the state was relatively weak, the core tasks of civil society, such as poor relief or the establishing of institutions—museums, libraries, symphony orchestras—relied on the private initiatives of the American bourgeoisie and middle class, respectively. In reality, however, the “great American middle class” was much more fragmented than the emphasis placed on it in political discourse might suggest. One important reason for this was racial exclusion. Although the emergence of an Afro-American middle class succeeded in the last third of the nineteenth century, its rise was restricted by a variety of racially motivated discriminations. Overcoming such racial segregation was hardly possible until the second half of the twentieth century.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

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