Virginia Stephen’s Uneasy Heritage: Lessons, Readers, and Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Rigel Daugherty
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf says she was “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (65). Mark Hussey notes that her parents “knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well” (ix). Yet Leslie Stephen thought his journalism and dictionary-making put him on the periphery of the “intellectual aristocracy,” preventing him from making a real mark in philosophical or ethical thought. And although Woolf saw her parents as well-to-do (not rich), Stephen was haunted by money worries most of his life. Acutely aware of being an outsider – from her mother’s social ease, her friends’ intellectual agility, and the working classes’ material experiences – Woolf used that outsider status to see and critique class assumptions in herself and others. Yet insider contradictions and compromises abound in her life and work, as many commentators have noted, with sober understanding, spiteful glee, or dismissive shouts. In this paper, I propose to examine Virginia Stephen’s class heritage from the angle Virginia Woolf insists on in Three Guineas, that of the educated man’s daughter. What did Stephen learn from her father about the writer’s “place” in the class system? What did reading and writing do about class barriers? What did Leslie Stephen himself have to say about class in his “Thoughts of an Outsider” columns and elsewhere? How did those lessons affect Virginia Stephen’s experiences with Morley College students? What does Virginia Stephen’s class heritage reveal about class in Virginia Woolf?

Fight Club, 1880: Boxing, Class, and Literary Culture in John Boyle O'Reilly's Boston

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-736
Author(s):  
JAMES EMMETT RYAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Newspaper Editor ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Fight Club ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Because late nineteenth-century American sport was connected to both immigrant assimilation and cultural prestige, this essay first describes Boston amateur athletics during the later nineteenth century. Ireland-born poet/lecturer/newspaper editor John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–90) provides an important example of social and intellectual class mobility from the perspective of an immigrant writer. We observe through O'Reilly's sporting experiences and literary career how the development of upper-class amateur athletics in Boston and the popularity of boxing among its Irish working classes gave him exceptional influence among both groups. His history of boxing, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888), is examined in detail as a key statement on pugilism, masculinity, and American citizenship fame. This view of Boston's intellectual and physical cultures, observed from the standpoint of O'Reilly, a talented writer and a sort of literary counterpart of famed pugilist John L. Sullivan (his friend, occasional sparring partner, and fellow celebrity among the Irish American community), sheds light on newly available pathways to social mobility made possible by simultaneous engagement with literary and athletic cultures.

THE ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN: ITS RISE AND FALL

2012 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 23-57
Author(s):  
Andrew Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Language ◽  
Short Review ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
English System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

Invalid Modernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Aesthetic

The opening chapter discusses representations of the aesthete and convalescent as seminal figures in the late nineteenth-century formation of modernist art and literature. Unlike the more fashionable treatment of disease in the Victorian period, embodied often in the figure of the female invalid, modernist representations of disease or illness were more likely to be considered pathological, subject to increasing medicalization, diagnosis, and incarceration. The figures of the male aesthete and convalescent offer a more transgressive model to ideals of health and improvement by which modernity is measured. This figure was, not insignificantly, formative in the appearance of the sexual other or “invert” in sexological research. By looking at several writers—Friedrich Nietzsche, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—this opening chapter seeks a correlation between the aesthetic and the body, between autonomy and contagion.

scholarly journals ‘Praise the Lord! We are a Musical Nation’: The Welsh Working Classes and Religious Singing

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-472
Author(s):  
Helen Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Hymn Singing ◽  
Insight Into

The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down deeply during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’.Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back, when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes.This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.

scholarly journals Environmental Writing for Children

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Environmental Writing ◽  
Children's Writing ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article analyzes representative topoi or traditions emanating from the so-called golden age of children’s writing in the late Victorian era that feature encounters with the physical environment. It traces the emergence of modern (Western) environmentally oriented children’s literature and examines the permutations of two overlapping topoi that have served as carriers of environmental concern since the late nineteenth century. It reviews works that purport to imagine nonhuman life-worlds from the standpoint of the creatures themselves and those that deal with the discovery or construction of special, often hidden outdoor places by children that are shown to have catalytic significance in bonding them to the natural environment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document