Family, Class, Honor, Manhood: Lieutenant Edmond de Lotbinière Joly in India, Paris, and Crimea, 1850–1857

2020 ◽  
pp. 036319902093987
Author(s):  
J. I. Little

During the relatively short period when he was a junior officer in the British colonial army, Edmond Joly served in the recently annexed Punjab, at the siege of Sebastopol, and in the effort to rescue his regiment in Lucknow where he was mortally wounded at the age of twenty-four. Earlier that same year, the young Canadian had spent four months in Paris immersed in the social whirl of the aristocratic elite. Beyond describing those eventful years in intimate detail, Joly’s hitherto-unexamined personal letters, memoir, and journal reveal that his chief motivation in becoming a soldier and repeatedly risking his life after a rebellious youth was to gain the respect of his demanding father. The themes of emerging manhood and family honor are therefore central to this article, which also provides an intimate example of the clash between traditional aristocratic values and those of the rising middle class in the modernizing Victorian era.

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
V. V. Gorshkova ◽  
A. A. Melnikova

The article considers the contradictions and conflicts that are characteristic of modern Russian society. The processes of social disintegration are analyzed and interpreted as a result of fundamental social and economic transformations. The problems of economic inequality are presented in the historical perspective in close connection with the previous stages of Russia's socioeconomic development. Significant polarization of the population is one of the most significant conflict factors in modern society, which leads to an increase in protest moods and may in the long term threaten social upheavals. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with the socio-economic situation does not lead to ideas of the unification and consolidation of society, but find expression in social conflicts. The emergence and development of social conflicts is influenced by a number of factors: economic, ethnic, religious. One of the most important characteristics of society is its social structure. After the collapse of the USSR, the previous social structure was abolished, and a new social reality was formed in Russia. When considering the stratification structure of society, most attention is paid to the middle class, which is considered the backbone of a stable society. The middle class in Russia is in the stage of formation, it is hardly possible to speak of a complete analogy with the middle class of Western society. The share of middle class in society can be estimated in different ways depending on the methodological approaches used by researchers. An important consequence of the transformation of the social structure was the problem of marginalization, since the dismantling of the old social structure and the slow formation of the new one put the social status and place in the division of labor system of many individuals into question. The sharp impoverishment of representatives of prestigious professions led to a reassessment of their situation, especially for the younger generation. When analyzing the origins of social conflicts in modern Russian society, it is necessary to consider the issue of the attitude of the broad masses of the population to power and national elites. It should be noted that power in Russia historically takes shape around specific leaders and does not have an institutional character. The most significant factor shaping the attitude towards the authorities and the elite in general in Russian society are the economic results of the market reforms that have taken place. Only a small part of the population believes that they won as a result of the changes that have taken place, the natural consequence of which is the population's distrust of the authorities and, in general, political institutions.


1988 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Lust

The  study deals with the spontaneous resettlement of a fire area, after  destruction of 600 ha Scots pine forest. The following items have been  examined in particular: the composition of the tree species, the duration of  the regeneration period, the influence of the parent stand, the exposition,  the slope, the treatment, the fire regime and the social differentiation.      The resettlement took place very quickly and over a very short period.  Birch and Scots pine take up 95 % of the stem number. The regeneration result  is precarious, yet mostly good. The parent stand is favourable both to seed  supply and to microclimate, but only over a short distance. The Scots pine  prefers more open and dry areas, whereas birch needs more humidity.     Practice has shown that natural regeneration of Scots pine stands is  possible. The forest treatment, however, is very important. It determines not  only the immediate result of the regeneration, but also the composition and  the structure of the future stand.


Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Beginning around 1860, authors in the Egyptian capital portrayed Cairo’s changing cityscape and the recent emergence of local newspapers in terms of their impact on rationality (‘aql). In their descriptions, these contemporaries depicted rationality as an education of the heart that especially enabled men from the middle class to control their bodies and passions. The chapter shows that Cairo’s transformation was, however, not always associated with rising rationality by drawing on a different set of sources. Police and court records from the 1860s and 1870s demonstrate that contemporaries also described processes of urban change as a danger to the “honor” of lower-class women. Like the debates in Berlin, emotional practices in Cairo thus served as a way to address the social formation of the Egyptian capital during a time of dynamic transformation.


Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta

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.


Author(s):  
Patrick Chura

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.


1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field

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.


1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley

The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the ‘new childhood’ argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.


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