Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-52
Author(s):  
David Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
System P ◽  
Blue Eyes ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.

Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century

Slavic Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Brower
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stress ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Labor Violence ◽  
Insight Into

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

‘It is astonishing how little literature has to show of the life of the poor’: Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review and D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 86-107
Author(s):  
Annalise Grice
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Short Form ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
The Poor ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Insight Into

Ford Madox Ford’s founding (but short lived) editorship of The English Review from 1908-1910 inspired and provided an early publication venue for the young D. H. Lawrence, who wrote several of his early stories and sketches to please his new literary mentor as he began to move in metropolitan literary circles. This chapter identifies a consistent focus on working-class themes across contributions to The English Review and outlines Ford’s interest in the conte, or what he termed ‘the real short story’, which was in Ford’s eyes best modelled by Henry James and the nineteenth-century European tradition of Maupassant and Balzac. These were writers Lawrence also admired and Ford deemed Lawrence’s earliest regional stories to be apposite for his cultural journal which called for more working class voices, an insight into the life of the poor and greater experimentation in the short form by English writers. The chapter also considers that Lawrence’s production of several (little-known) short sketches on his experiences as a schoolteacher in Croydon were intended for Ford’s journal.

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.

DRESSING UP: HARDY’S TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES AND OLIPHANT’S PHOEBE JUNIOR

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsie B. Michie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Clothing Industry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Middle Region ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Late Nineteenth

THE ANXIETY ABOUT BEING ill- or well-dressed that Margaret Oliphant evokes so vividly in this passage was particularly acute in the last half of the nineteenth century when changes in the clothes people wore reflected increasing class mobility. With the growth of a ready-to-wear clothing industry that made it more and more difficult to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the lower echelons of society, “dress became,” as Charles Blanc argued in 1872, “an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). Alongside and as a result of this democratization of dress, a backlash occurred in which subtleties of dress became a means of reinforcing the very class distinctions that seemed to be vanishing in the late nineteenth century. As Rudolph von Jhering argued in 1869, “Fashion is the barrier — continually raised anew because continually torn down — by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Phoebe Junior, Thomas Hardy and Oliphant use fashion to explore the freedoms and limitations of late nineteenth- century class mobility by telling the story of heroines who are able, in part through education, to separate themselves from their lower-class roots, a separation that is marked in each case by a change in attire.

Industrial Arbitration, Equity, and Authority in England, 1800—1850

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Class Community

In an obscure aside, the well-known English working-class radical, Francis Place, remarked in his Autobiography that even when “in deepest poverty” he had tried to serve other artisans. Some he had helped to train up as small masters or foremen while others he aided by working to settle their problems and disputes. “I had many matters brought to me for adjudication, arbitration or arrangement,” he wrote. “I hardly know the time when for three months together I have been free from this kind of interference.” Most matters it seems had to do with debtors and their creditors, but others appear to have concerned the settlement of estates or even affairs “related to an association or large body of men.” While he may have been justly proud of his service to the working-class community, Place's comment provides an insight into working-class life that is rarely glimpsed. He did not choose the word arbitration accidentally. By the nineteenth century, life and work in England had been penetrated by forms of dispute resolution that were meant to secure “order without law.”

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

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