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5 •• Class Increased concern for the welfare of the working classes is one dominant motif of political debate in the mid-nineteenth century with which the organisers of the Great Exhibition could not avoid engaging. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), Friedrich Engels wrote about the impoverished and demoralised state of provincial workers that he had witnessed first hand, famously proclaiming, ‘Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as well as physically and mentally’ (p. 144). In 1842, Edwin
2 Class unconsciousness Meyerhold’s chronotope A scribble of ribbon winds over a grid (Figure 2.1). The axes are numbered, clearly intended to identify the spaces of the grid and thus to locate the ribbon precisely. The handwritten notes along the sides of the grid explain that the drawing is a “spatial-chronometric” notation of the scene – a plan of movement across the stage, with approximate timing. The drawing graphs the movement of two entities, marked “S” and “B,” along with the time when they cross particular points. Although the author of this graph is
will know how much they tell us about life in those times. I would like our written reconstructions to be as faithful an account for the 1980s as we can manage’. It led to one correspondent’s response: ‘I am interested in this project but do not see how any house is “typical” of the period. Well some are I suppose. Perhaps the 1970s and 1980s when reconstructed in museums will be pure HABITAT? But isn’t that a class thing?’ 2 This response rightly points out the impossibility of typifying domestic taste across a period while
In this article I use conceptual frames drawn from autobiography studies and feminist theory to examine the relationships between bodily experience and the social construction of sex, gender and class as they play themselves out in a selection of womens medical consultation letters written to the eminent Swiss physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, during the second half of the eighteenth century. My analysis of a selection of consultation letters - all of which are situated and read in the context of a rich archival collection of some 1,200 letters - considers the role that bodily experience plays in the construction of self and suggests that not only the experience, but also the textual articulation of the body, were imagined both through and against accepted understandings of sex, gender and class during this period.
This article addresses three topics. It describes Chartisms creation of a ‘peoples history’ as an alternative to middle-class history, whether Whig or Tory. It locates the sources, most of which have not been noticed before, for the Chartist narrative of the English Reformation. William Cobbetts reinterpretation of the English Reformation is well known as a source for the working-class narrative; William Howitts much less familiar but more important source, antedating Cobbetts History of the Protestant Reformation in England, is used for the first time. The article reconstructs that narrative using printed and manuscript lectures and published interpretations dating from the first discussions of the Peoples Charter in 1836 to the last Chartist Convention in 1858. The manuscript lectures of Thomas Cooper are an essential but little-used source. The article contributes to historical understanding of the intellectual life of the English working class.
Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). They are absent from two valuable art historical surveys of the period: C. Stephens (ed.), The History of British Art 1870–Now (London: Tate Publishing, 2008) ; and D. Arnold and D. Peters Corbett (eds), A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Nor do they appear in A. J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Cultural Production and Social Policy in Victorian
Methodist Central Halls were built in most British towns and cities. They were designed not to look like churches in order to appeal to the working classes. Entirely multi-functional, they provided room for concerts, plays, film shows and social work alongside ordinary worship. Some contained shops in order to pay for the future upkeep of the building. The prototype for this programme was provided in Manchester and opened on Oldham Street in 1886. This article offers a first analysis of it as a building type and looks at the wider social and cultural contribution of the building. It continues the narrative by discussing changing use and design during a twentieth century that witnessed the widespread contraction of Methodist congregations.
The spirituality of Brunswick Chapel, Leeds, in the Victorian era illustrates the legacy of John Wesley when Wesleyan Methodism was a power in the land. The priorities were conversion, turning to Christ in repentance and faith, the Bible as the source of divine instruction, the cross as the way in which salvation was achieved and activism as the proper human response. These features were prominent in the whole of the broader Evangelical movement which Wesley inaugurated. There was concern with death, and especially last words, in providing evidence of the assurance on which Wesley insisted and which was cultivated in the class meetings he began. Prayer, Charles Wesley’s hymns and sermons loomed large. Men and women had their own channels for the expression of piety, but some avenues, especially in Sunday school teaching, were open to either sex. Some still professed Wesley’s sublime doctrine of entire sanctification. Towards the end of the period there were signs that the tradition was decaying, with the spirituality becoming shallower, but for the bulk of the period the tradition was flourishing.