British Working Class Research Articles

‘A distressing scene’? The corpse in the nineteenth-century working-class home

ABSTRACT When Edwin Chadwick released his report into burial reform in 1843 he was highly critical of the working-class practice of keeping the dead body in the home for up to a week in the period between death and burial. Chadwick argued that the English working-classes kept the body for so long for economic reasons and that as a result of living in close quarters with a corpse they picked up negative associations with death and suffered moral decline. This paper overturns this assumption by using evidence from nineteenth-century folklore collections and working-class autobiography to argue that the long-standing tradition of keeping the body in the home and rallying round to prepare it for burial held a deep significance for rural working-class people. The gradual preparation of the body for burial engaged the senses and centred on the visual appearance of the corpse enabling rural folk to confirm social bonds through the formation of collective memories, demonstrate the respectability of both the deceased and their family, accept the reality of death, and begin the mourning process.

Dynamics of English gratitude expression: a corpus-assisted analysis of UK government COVID-19 briefings

Abstract With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for protecting public health. Gratitude of varying intensities was expressed (e.g. by highlighting metaphorical dimensions such as WIDTH and DEPTH) to correspond to the importance of a benefit (judged by how much the given benefit matches the receiver’s needs and preferences) and/or to implicitly display the evaluation of the benefactor’s responsibility and efforts. We tentatively formulate a dynamic model of gratitude expression in public discourse and shed light on the metaphorical conceptualisation of English gratitude expression and the power of gratitude expression in boosting social cohesion and directing social actions in a discourse of crisis.

Racial capitalism and the ordinary extractivism of British elite schools overseas

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the relationship between elite British boarding schools and the overseas branches (‘satellites’) that they have established around the world. While British schools are categorised as charities, the satellites are operated as commercial ventures through subsidiaries. The UK-based schools can thus profit from the export of their ‘brands’, extracting capital from their satellites overseas and channelling it back to the UK. Drawing on interviews with staff of these satellite schools and on documentary analysis (including Charity Commission reports), we use the lens of racial capitalism to analyse the relationships between British elite schools and their overseas branches. We argue that through their overseas operations, British elite schools engage in extractive practices and are complicit in processes of enclosure and dispossession. These processes are premised along racialised lines and ultimately ensure that the promised ‘British eliteness’ remains out of reach for those who subsidise its social reproduction.

British Working Class Whiteness: Focusing on the New Labour in Power (1997-2010)

British Working Class Whiteness: Focusing on the New Labour in Power (1997-2010)

British elite swimmers' experiences and perspectives on life skill development.

This study explores the experiences of British elite swimmers in developing life skills during and throughout their athletic careers, examining the factors that influence their perspectives on this skill development. Six high-profile British swimmers, who have competed at the Commonwealth and/or Olympic Games, were recruited for this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and thematic analysis was applied. Through the analysis, two key themes were identified from the thematic analysis: (a) Implicit life skill development through athletic and educational experience, and (b) Understanding the influence of swimming on life skill development. The first theme includes three sub-themes: (a) Establishment of athletic identity, (b) Prioritization of athletic identity, and (c) Navigating life skills through athletic challenges. The findings show that the swimming careers of participants and their associated identities contributed to the development of a wide range of implicit life skills. This growth was facilitated by both educational and sporting experiences, with all participants reporting positive personal development from their time in competitive swimming. The findings in this study enhance our understanding of life skill development and provide insights into how to more effectively support high-performance athletes in both their athletic careers and educational endeavors.

Inside the ivory tower, the view from a “space invader”: An exploratory study into the ways racialized PhD students experience white ignorance in elite universities in the UK

AbstractThis paper examines the experiences of racialized PhD students in British elite universities. It is framed by Mills' (2007) conception of white ignorance and reflects on the power of whiteness that shapes everyday experiences in such places of privilege. For Mills, the production of racism relies on epistemological processes that produce ignorance, and which promote various ways of ignoring the histories and legacies of European colonialism. Research has shown that professors find it difficult to talk about racism and coloniality within higher education. Professors responses are important as they may affect the outcomes of conducting research for PhD students, yet there is less understanding of how racialized PhD students experience or address white ignorance. Using in‐depth interviews with 14 racialized PhD students, this paper critically examines the intertwined relationship between the coloniality of knowledge and white ignorance within elite universities in the United Kingdom. While universities have been regarded as “neutral” knowledge‐producing institutions, this study challenges the assumptions, interactions, and practices of higher education disciplines in the social sciences, namely anthropology and sociology. Based on the findings of this work, we argue that white ignorance is an epistemic strategy that justifies racial domination within and beyond the halls of academia.

Eve Worth. The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain Since 1945 New Directions in Social and Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. 264. $115.00 (cloth).

Eve Worth. <i>The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain Since 1945</i> New Directions in Social and Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. 264. $115.00 (cloth).

CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON

ABSTRACTIn this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth‐Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a “structured process” that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a “voluntarist.” In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of “lived experience” whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth‐century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past‐oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future‐oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class‐specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes.

The Discussion of the Tendences and Evolution of the European Security Issues in the British Parliament (1990-2010)

The article is devoted to the discussion of European security issues in the British Parliament in the post-bipolar period. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the British establishment had to revise the foreign policy doctrine of the United Kingdom to adapt it to the demands of the post-bipolar age. During this period, parliamentarians discussed the future role of NATO after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. The political establishment has continued to define NATO as the foundation of the Euroatlantic system of collective security. After the direct military threat from the USSR vanished, the British elites had difficulties formulating the strategic goal of the North Atlantic alliance's existence. Another important topic was the creation of the European Union, its future enlargement in Central-Eastern Europe, and the search for the best approach to British European policy under new circumstances. There was an agreement that the idea of the “Europe of Nations” was best suited to British national interests. The British government also deterred attempts by France and Germany to transform the European Union into a federal superstate. The Balkan crisis also became a central topic that caused heated debates in Parliament in an attempt to find a path to a peaceful settlement. In the case of military interventions in local conflicts, the British establishment tried to evade direct intervention in the Balkan crisis but was forced to reconsider its position under growing pressure from allies, who began to experience economic and reputational damage. The humanitarian intervention in Kosovo created a precedent that was used to justify interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia were also discussed.

Expert Equestrians: How the Game of Polo Forged Masculinities in British India and the British Metropole, 1862–1914

ABSTRACT Polo is a team sport played on horseback hitting a small ball through the opposing team’s goal. In today’s form, it originated in Northern India and is an example of colonial encounter and the formation of colonial masculinities. This paper follows Mrinalini Sinha’s findings that see power at the centre of masculinity in arguing that the emerging dynamics between elite colonisers and colonised displayed in the game of polo aided both groups’ interest to rule. The late nineteenth century was defined by shifts in imperial social relations and the outdoors became a space to practice changes linked to racial, class, sex, ethnic, or national differences and discourses. Threatened not least by the emergence of Indian nationalism, British elite colonisers and Indian nobility played polo to assure each other of their social, cultural, and political power arrangement within a mostly homosocial milieu. In playing polo a cross-racial (elite) form of masculinity was practiced that allowed both groups to showcase their manliness and upkeep existing social hierarchies and status. After arriving in the metropole, polo turned into an even more elite form of masculinity to defend fragile class divides and reassure British upper classes of their status and privilege.

The dividing question as a hedging tool in the dialogues of the British working class

The subject of the study is the dividing issues-hedges in the speech of the British working class. The purpose of the work is to determine the features of their functioning as a means of speech fencing (hedging). The main communicative tasks for which representatives of the British working class resort to using the structure of the dividing question in order to hedge their statements are identified: expression of opinion, criticism, statement of fact, assumption, proposal, demand, request for information and intention. A number of patterns have also been identified when using ascending or descending nuclear tones in the second half of the dividing questions used as hedges. The material of the study is the dialogues of the characters, representatives of the modern London working class, of the movie "Sorry We Missed You" (2019, directed by K. Loach) in the original language. The work uses linguistic and contextual analysis in order to classify the research material. Audit and electroacoustic analysis of statements were also carried out using the Praat program. The novelty of the study lies in the choice of material and subject of the study: the film "Sorry We Missed You" has not been considered by linguists as a material for analyzing the rhythmic dynamics of English speech, and the features of hedging in communication of the British working class remain extremely poorly studied. The study showed that hedging, allowing communicants to maintain each other's personal boundaries, is not always a means of making a statement polite, as it is often used even in conflict situations. The emotional state of the addressee does not reduce the need to apply a speech separation strategy (including using the structure of the dividing question), but it affects its rhythmic and melodic design. Other important factors in choosing the intonation of hedges are the desire to continue or end the conversation, as well as the gender of the speaker.

The ‘forgotten’ sociologist, Florence Kelley

Florence Kelley, whose theoretical and empirical activity played a central role in the development of social analysis, started promoting social research in the US in the early 1890s, with a critique of the capitalistic organisation of labour and the exploitation of children and women in the factories and sweatshops of Illinois. This research was also decisive in the contemporary development and use of qualitative and quantitative methods. Poverty, a central element in Kelley’s observations, was to her mind, the fruit of the total subordination to work of workers, their families and their communities. Her theoretical knowledge, based on her American studies, her pragmatism and the Hull-House women’s practice of democracy, was enriched by her history, economics and law studies in European universities and her relationship with the socialist tradition, with Marx and with Engels, whose The Condition of the Working Class in England she translated into English in 1887. The construction of an American sociological canon erased Kelley’s activity and that of many other women, authors of important research, excluded by a slew of anti-women behaviours and critical silences about their lack of scientificity. But History is blotted out by a highly focused present as Anselm Strauss is said to have stated (1993, p.256), a contradictory present in which the idea of a vocation on the part of women to transform research is becoming ever more central: I am seeking an end to androcentrism, not to systematic inquiry (Harding, 1986, p.10). Reflection on Florence Kelley’s personal journey re-opens debates and questions as to the reasons why in the last century, in the 1990s, there began a process of reappropriation of women’s contribution to the history of sociological thought and social research, which necessarily leads to their founding presence in training curricula and sociological tradition thus restoring contents, dignity and memory.

Clássicos no fundo das minas

Over the course of this text we shall visit several sites of interaction between mineworkers and the ancient Greek and Roman classics. Beyond simply attesting to their existence, assessment of these interactions will cast some light on Graeco-Roman antiquity’s curious appeal to the mineworker of the period. But first I should contextualize this somewhat niche line of inquiry. The research into miner classics was undertaken when working with Edith Hall on her AHRC-funded project ‘Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1939’. The project was designed ‘to provoke a shift in the perception of the history of British classics, away from a conservative tradition of institutionalized elitism towards a brighter history of broadly inclusive cultural practice and inspired creativity’ (Stead; Hall, 2015, p. 19).

E.V. From ‘Greater’ to ‘Global Britain’: The New and the Old in the Foreign Policy of the United Kingdom

The UK withdrawal from the European Union forced the country to reevaluate its relations with the outer world. These political and ideological searches culminated in the concept of Global Britain. At the same time, they have drawn attention of the academic community to similar intellectual endeavors at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, when British politicians also faced the need for a qualitative reassessment of the empire’s place in the world. In this context historical references can both help to place the concept of Global Britain within a broader ideological and political framework and shed light on some of its less obvious aspects. And it is particularly interesting to compare it with the concept of Greater Britain, which was extensively discussed during that period. The first section of the paper identifies the origins of the Greater Britain concept, as well as its key provisions. The author notes that the idea of ‘Greater Britain’, aiming to create a sort of federation that would bring together the metropole and the dominions, emerged as a response to growing centrifugal tendencies within the British Empire and intensification of colonial rivalry between the great powers. The second section outlines the conceptual core of the ‘Global Britain’, which involves expanding the scope of the UK foreign policy opportunities after leaving the European Union by establishing a more active interaction with countries and regions that were once part of the empire. The paper emphasizes the migration factor, which served as a fundamental element of the British statehood in various periods of its history and became an integral part of the British political identity. The author argues that there is a certain continuity in the ideological and philosophical content of the two concepts, which were both formulated in similar conditions, both originated from the search for new guidelines for the UK policy in a changing world. However, these concepts shouldn’t be confused. Whereas ‘Greater Britain’ was aimed at consolidating the crumbling empire, ‘Global Britain’ is intended primarily to bridge various divides across the society, which in turn implies re-examination of the UK national identity in general. The author concludes that the concept of Global Britain in its current form cannot address these issues, on the contrary, it rather epitomizes the lack of innovative ideas and solutions among contemporary British elites.

Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England

ABSTRACT This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the “elite” became exclusive of the “popular,” when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.

The Unaccompanied: Poetic Expressions of the Working Classes in England

Since the lost labour struggles of the mid-1980s, (working-class) poets like Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage have progressively asserted their themes across the social strata. Hence, four of their poems are put to closer scrutiny. Especially Armitage’s verse mirrors a tendency in contemporary working-class poetry – frequently located in the North and the Midlands – to reflect on endangered traditions, with no small amount of nostalgia. Yet, its issues – solidarity, equality and historical consciousness – have also been taken up by black and female lyricists. Consequently, the poetry of the new working classes includes the concerns of all disadvantaged people of England (and the world).

Eugenics and the Approval of Birth Control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference

Following the vote in favour of birth control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Church of England became the first major Christian denomination explicitly to condone the use of birth control. This paper argues that the bishop of Winchester, Theodore Woods, was the previously unheralded principal actor responsible for reversing the position of the Church. Woods was convinced that the Church needed to ‘modernise’ its position in order to secure a receptive audience for its higher-ordered teachings on marriage, sex and especially procreation. In turn, he hoped to bring about an increased birthrate amongst the eugenically ‘desirable’ English middle and upper classes.

The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945, by Eve Worth

The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945, by Eve Worth

The impact of teaching on salaries

Peter Tymms, Emeritus Professor at Durham University, discusses a report looking at the economic benefits of high-quality early years teaching for children later in life which he co-authored with the Department for Education, entitled The economic benefits of effective reception classes in England, published earlier this year.

Book Review: The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 by Eve Worth

Book Review: <i>The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945</i> by Eve Worth