Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825–1875

1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Cordery
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Power ◽  
External Control ◽  
State Control ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Class Context ◽  
Friendly Societies

In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.

A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS: THOMAS COOPER'S CHARTISTBILDUNGSROMAN

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Vargo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
School Teacher ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
A Minor

The improbable course of Thomas Cooper'slife (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorizedHamletand significant portions ofParadise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication ofThe Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely basedAlton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author ofSelf-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

scholarly journals ‘Right Taste, Wrong Place’: Local Food Cultures, (Dis)identification and the Formation of Classed Identity

Sociology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1089-1105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedetta Cappellini ◽  
Elizabeth Parsons ◽  
Vicki Harman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
User Friendliness ◽  
Food Cultures ◽  
Class Context ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Wrong Sort

This article investigates how culinary taste contributes to the formation of middle class identity in a working class context in the UK. We explore practices of food consumption among a group of individuals working at a UK university located in a working class city. We find a rather limited and discrepant cosmopolitanism, in which culinary practices are evaluated in terms of those worth engaging in, and those not worth engaging in, based on their ‘user friendliness’ for cosmopolitan middle class dispositions. Depictions of the local food culture as lacking are also dominant, used as a negative ground against which these dispositions are hierarchically formulated. Here middle class culinary tastes seem to be driven by disengagement with the wrong sort of place and a relatively closed alignment with the ‘proper’ and the ‘safe’ rather than by any open creative individuality.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

We're Still Here

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Face ◽  
Depth Interviews

The economy has been brutal to American workers. The chance to provide a better life for one’s children—the promise at the heart of the American Dream—is slipping away. In the face of soaring economic inequality and mounting despair, we might expect struggling Americans to rise up together and demand their fair share of opportunity. And yet, the groups who stand to gain the most from collective mobilization appear the least motivated to act in their own self-interest. This book examines why disadvantaged people disable themselves politically. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over one hundred black, white, and Puerto Rican residents in a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, We’re Still Here demonstrates that many working-class people are fiercely critical of growing inequality and of the politicians who have failed to protect them from poverty, exploitation, and social exclusion. However, the institutions that historically mediated between personal suffering and collective political struggle have not only become weak, but have become sites of betrayal. In response, working-class people turn inward, cultivating individualized strategies for triumphing over pain. Convinced that democratic processes are rigged in favor of the wealthy, they search for meaning in internet conspiracy theories or the self-help industry—solitary strategies that turn them inward, or turn them against each other. But as visions of a broken America unite people across gender, race, and age, they also give voice to upended hierarchies, creative re-imaginings of economic justice, and yearnings to be part of a collective whole.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals ‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’: The Significance of Class in Critics' Representations of Heavy Metal Music and its Fans

2014 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy R. Brown ◽  
Christine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Heavy Metal Music ◽  
The Uk

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neoliberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999–2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the ‘counter culture’, now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

Reconceptualizing College Knowledge: Class, Race, and Black Students in a College-Counseling Field

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072110460
Author(s):  
Melanie Jones Gast
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
College Access ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
College Counseling ◽  
College Knowledge ◽  
High School Counseling ◽  
College Going ◽  
Knowledge Class

Past work and college–access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college–aspiring working- and middle–class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their post–high school updates. Respondents were exposed to college–going messages but faced racial constraints and unclear expectations for college preparation and help seeking. Working-class respondents drew on hopeful uncertainty—a repertoire of hope for college admissions but uncertainty in the specifics—and they waited for assistance. Twelfth-grade working–class respondents experienced the effects of counseling problems and frustrations near application time. Middle-class and some working–class respondents used a repertoire of competitive groundwork to improve their competitiveness for four–year admissions, targeting their help seeking to navigate impending deadlines and late–stage counseling problems. My findings point to the timing and process of activating repertoires of college knowledge within a high school counseling field, suggesting the need to reconceptualize college knowledge in research on racial and class inequality in college access.

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