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2 Time and society in the eighteenth century P eople’s perception of time, of how it might be measured or divided up, and how it ought to be spent, depended very much on whether they lived in town or country, and where they stood in the social hierarchy. England in 1700 was a dominantly rural society. Just under a quarter of the population inhabited towns with a population over 2,500, nearly half of these urban dwellers living in London.1 If the minimum population of a town is raised to 5,000, then 83 per cent of the population were rural dwellers in 1700, a
bring it under the normative umbrella of legal and democratic oversight” ( p. 76 ). Her policy response captures the national border’s expansions into space and incorporates “the very logic of de-territorialized migration control … while at the same time subverting it,” by calling for an expansion in the extraterritorial reach of human rights while at the same time relaxing the fixation on territorial access ( p. 16 ). Shachar’s essay functions as a road map for deciphering “the emerging code of the shifting border in a world in which prosperous ‘islands’ of high
5 Work time in decline, 1830 –1970 F rom the 1830s hours of work, which increased over the period from 1750 onwards, began a long decline that lasted through to the 1970s. The decline began with daily hours, first for children, and then more widely. The pattern of the week began to be reshaped with St Monday losing out to Saturday afternoon. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, and with much greater impetus in the twentieth, annual holidays with pay became a possibility and eventually a norm. It was in the twentieth century, too, that retirement became
‘Questions for the Time Being’, also from The White Stones , Prynne opposes the ‘diffusion’ of community to alienated existence: ‘living in hope is so silly when our desires/are so separate’, and we find a suspicion of the counter-cultural moment very much like Sinclair’s: ‘Really it’s/laughable & folks talk of discontent or waiting/to see what they can make of it’. 20 At the end of the poem, however, Prynne adopts a much more urgent, even astringent, tone: The up- shot is simple & as follows: 1. No one has any right
4 Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871–85 Martin Hewitt In April 1871 a letter signed ‘John Watts’ appeared in the Manchester Guardian. Watts’ name would have been well known to the paper’s readers, as he was a local social reformer of nearly 30 years’ standing, and a regular correspondent of the Guardian, which he had frequently used to launch or sustain reform campaigns. This time his object was a scheme for deploying the funds left in the hands of the Cotton Relief Committee at the end of the Cotton Famine of
… well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering which he cannot see. Albert Camus, The Plague We live in an ageing society. In 2017 the United Nations noted the following trends in global population ageing: The global population aged 60 years or over numbered 962 million in 2017, more than twice as large as in 1980, when there were 382 million older persons worldwide. The number of older persons is expected to double again by
4 For the first time on screen together: Madame Bovary and Les Misérables in 1934 Dudley Andrew In the winter of 1934 two highly anticipated titles premiered just weeks apart on Paris screens: Jean Renoir’s Madame Bovary (13 January) and Raymond Bernard’s Les Misérables (3 February). Evidently they were so different in style and tone that virtually no one remarked on this coincidence at the time. But from what did that difference stem? The styles of the directors or of the books they took on? My brief is to use these adaptations to examine style and tone
‘A long time in the womb’: the TV films 3 ‘Oh, it’s Beaujolais. Fantastic! Won’t be a sec, I’ll just pop it in the fridge’. Has any beverage in any work of art ever excited quite so much comment or controversy as that bottle of red wine in Leigh’s 1977 play – and its TV adaptation – Abigail’s Party? Abigail’s Party was just one of the nine feature-length productions which Leigh ‘devised and directed’ (his preferred credit at the time) between 1973 and 1985. The success of these meant that, as Garry Watson observes, ‘most British viewers were aware of Leigh long
Go Tell It on the Mountain sheds light on James Baldwin’s response to his Pentecostal religious inheritance. Baldwin writes protagonist John Grimes’s experience of “salvation” as an act of his own break with his past and the inauguration of a new vocation as authorial witness of his times. This break is premised on the experience of kairos, a form of time that was derived from Baldwin’s experience of Pentecostalism. Through John Grimes’s experience, Baldwin represents a break with the past that begins with the kairotic moment and progresses through the beginnings of self-love and the possibility of freedom enabled by this love. This essay contributes a new perspective on discussions of Baldwin’s representation of time and his relationship to Christianity.
If he is known for anything other than his writings, James Baldwin is best known for his work as a civil rights activist. What is often overlooked is Baldwin’s work toward uniting two under-represented and oppressed groups: African Americans and homosexuals. With his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin began a career of speaking about and for homosexuals and their relationship with the institutions of African-American communities. Through its focus on a sensitive, church-going teenager, Go Tell It on the Mountain dramatizes the strain imposed upon homosexual members of African-American communities within the Pentecostal Church through its religious beliefs.