Victorian Class Research Articles

Specters of Utopia in Mary Barton

Abstract: This article offers a substantial reinterpretation of Mary Barton in terms of Robert Owen's ideas, especially as outlined in his early tract A New View of Society . The article contends that Gaskell's novel stages a significant reassessment of the transformative possibilities of nineteenth-century paternalism. It also suggests, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, that the reformist aspirations of a utopian thinker such as Owen can only be articulated "spectrally" in the context of Victorian class conflict: that is, by positing the kind of presence that only an irremediable absence can enable and register.

Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, by Gül Kurtulu?

Reviewed by: Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s by Gül Kurtuluş Mary Christian (bio) Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, by Gül Kurtuluş; pp. 182. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020, $48.95. In Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s, Gül Kurtuluş examines late-Victorian theatrical depictions of metropolitan life in the works of three prominent turn-of-the-century dramatists, paying special attention to "the idea of community as formulated by the needs and requirements of its members" (14). Each of the three main chapters focuses on one well-known play: Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912). The chapters also give secondary attention to other works by the respective dramatists. Along with detailed close readings of the dramatic texts themselves, Kurtuluş draws attention to the London locations portrayed or mentioned in the plays. Some of the neighborhood information she provides is unsurprising—the average reader will probably already know that Mayfair is a posh London district and that Hoxton is not. However, some of these location notes will likely be new to many readers and might suggest new ideas regarding the subtexts of certain scenes. For example, Kurtuluş points out that Clerkenwell, the district inhabited by the troupe of actors in Trelawny of the "Wells" (1898), was an area with centuries of theatrical history, dating back to performances of mystery plays in the Middle Ages—a fact that might well enhance one's enjoyment of Pinero's play, with its themes of nostalgia and theatrical evolution. The book's introduction declares an interest in "the rules imposed by urban society" and the ways in which these rules are dramatized in the selected plays (14). The rules that receive the most attention throughout the book are the demands for women's sexual purity (or at least the appearance of purity), the adherence to prescribed gender roles, and the distinctions between different levels in the social class hierarchy. The author notes numerous details of plot, dialogue, and character that reflect the plays' preoccupation with these social requirements. These analyses, however, might lead readers to ask: If Londoners of this period were made to follow strict expectations regarding gender, sex, and class, then to what extent were these rules and hypocrisies unique to London? In what ways were demands for female chastity in London, and the way such demands were enforced, distinct from the conditions of smaller towns and rural areas? Kurtuluş acknowledges the need to address this question, or nearly acknowledges it, in the analysis of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She suggests that the Tanquerays' unhappy migration from London to Surrey illustrates that "a shift in setting . . . does not provide a remedy for the Victorian social diseases of class division and repressive morality that infect all the city's inhabitants" (95). The chapter's conclusion adds that "nineteenthcentury London and Victorian Britain in general evinced a quite hypocritical sense of morality and justice" (96). Many scholars of nineteenth-century literature would easily agree with this statement. The book, however, offers no clear response to the obvious follow-up question: If this hypocrisy is characteristic of Britain in this period, what sets London apart? Readers are left to wonder if Kurtuluş is writing a book about theatrical depictions of London or about theatrical depictions of Victorian class hierarchy and sexual mores more generally. [End Page 482] If the title's emphasis on "London" seems incompletely explained by the book as a whole, the Shaw chapter raises questions regarding the time period designated as the book's focus, "the 1890s." Shaw was active as a theater critic and dramatist during the 1890s, but this activity is scarcely mentioned. Instead the chapter focuses on Pygmalion and a handful of other plays—Man and Superman (1903), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), and Heartbreak House (1919)—all of which were written and set in the twentieth century. These plays offer valuable insights on London, and certainly comment more explicitly on...

Joe as the Wise Fool in Great Expectations: Dickens's Criticism of the Mid-Victorian Literature of Success and Upward Social Mobility

ABSTRACT Criticism of Great Expectations often portrays Joe, a gentle blacksmith, as important to the novel's definition of a true gentleman. While this is understandable, Joe plays a more important role in the novel's discussion of the contemporary literature of success to propagate the ideal of the self-made man. This role is as a wise fool and truth-teller, through whom Dickens highlights a contradiction in the literature's messages about the social mobility of working-class people. This contradiction arises as a result of the self-interested desire of the middle classes to bolster their advantageous position in the hierarchical Victorian society, and Dickens censures this self-interestedness. However, Dickens is also aligned with contemporary success stories in their denial of social climbing of the working classes because he believed that working-class social ambitions had the potential to disturb Victorian class society and his own gentlemanly identity. While he advocates a static stratified society, at the same time he wishes to ameliorate the status quo of Victorian class society and address the way it disadvantages the working classes. The means for social betterment proposed in Great Expectations involve the moral betterment of gentlemanly middle-class people.

General Materials

General Materials Albert D. Pionke (bio) In this year of pandemic library closures, frustrated interlibrary loan requests, and nonexistent campus mail service, four books are featured in the general materials section. All monographs, each manifests an interest in the intersection of literary form with aesthetic, intellectual, material, political, regional, or theological history. Identifying a “key role” for the “nineteenth-century study of language” in the “emergence of popular sovereignty” during the period between the First (1832) and Third (1884) Reform Acts, Barbara Barrow’s Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects (London: Routledge, 2019) proposes that Victorian poetry’s “lack of orderliness, its passages where poetic language spills over or exceeds its meter or formal confines,” be understood as philologically inflected interventions designed “to make visible the blind spots and exclusion of liberal reform” (p. 2). Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861)—which asserts a concurrence between political revolution and linguistic rejuvenation—provides an initial warrant for the book’s “nexus between language, philology, and politics,” itself first explored by means, not of a poem, but of Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 “experimental epic in prose,” The French Revolution (pp. 5, 6). Barrow retraces the text’s at times stylistically excessive engagement with the Revolution-era theories of language articulated within John Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1786), Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789) and “Preface” to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Panorama of Paris (1781–1788) and The New Paris (1789), arguing that “Carlyle’s positioning of the revolutionaries as a source of untapped, embodied potential paradoxically sets the terms for a Victorian conception of the modern polity” (p. 23). Poetic responses to Carlyle’s example, to later iterations of philological theory, and to the politics of ongoing franchise reform occupy the book’s four chapters, each of which addresses carefully selected works by one of the period’s major poets. Chapter 1 focuses on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s incorporation of the language theories of John Locke and Étienne de Condillac in An [End Page 315] Essay on Mind (1826), A Drama of Exile (1844), and, most importantly, Aurora Leigh (1856) in order to create “a bodiless poetry as a symbolic expression of women’s exclusion from the reformed electorate” (p. 33). Chapter 2 then reinterprets Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) as a “challenge [to] the democratic pretenses of mid-Victorian philology” during the period of the Second Reform Act (1867) and Richard Chenevix Trench’s early work on what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 70). According to Barrow, Browning “refuses any easy consensus of the demos as imagined by Trench, showing how forms of mass consensus can perpetuate a dangerous and deadly collectivity—as in the growth of empire—as well as overlook those subjects still excluded from the political and social benefits of the reforming state” (p. 88). In chapter 3, Barrow devotes prolonged attention to Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855) and Idylls of the King (1859–1885), arguing that through “sound patterns, metonymic substitutions, and lupine and canine imagery, Tennyson subtly challenges the use of philology and evolutionary science as a model for British imperial sovereignty” (p. 95). The line between human and animal language appears increasingly porous in both works, exposing, in Maud, “the irresolvable crisis of Victorian class relations,” and, in Idylls, “the advent and decline of empire as a cycle of evolution from, and degeneration into, brutes” (p. 109). Finally, chapter 4 argues that Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901) “challenge the metropolitan appropriation of rural speechways into a unified vision of the nation that followed the passage of the 1884 Reform Act” (p. 127). Barrow’s short reading of “Her Dilemma” (pp. 136–137) provides what is, perhaps, the book’s best example of the interanimating relationship between metrical irregularity, word choice, and an inferable resistance to both contemporary philological theory and overly optimistic assessments of the effects of electoral reform. Whether a wider selection of poems and/or poets would sustain the correspondence between Victorian...

The Disruption of Victorian Class and Gender Norms

During the late-nineteenth century, discussions surrounding female shop assistants permeated British society and culture appearing in newspapers, popular romance novels and political literature. Ultimately, through romantic literary and cultural texts “the shopgirl” emerged as a social construction, obscuring and shaping the experiences and identity of “ordinary” female shop assistants. While Victorian gender norms attempted to restrict women to the domestic sphere, the study of shopgirls illuminates the social anxieties and gender discourses that emerged alongside shifting consumption practices in Britain, resulting in the breakdown of separate gendered spaces. This paper will argue that the emergence of female shop assistants and the socially constructed “shopgirl” in the latter half of the nineteenth century transformed pre-existing Victorian class and gender norms in British society. Not only did shopgirls embody fantasies connected to consumer culture, but disrupted class and gender norms resulting in a variety of social anxieties, pertaining to the loss of female domesticity, social mobility, morality, as well as the dangers of London for women.

Cannibals and Capital: George King'sSweeney Todd(1936) and Representations of Class, Empire and Wealth

The story of Sweeney Todd has its origins in the era of Victorian stage melodrama, a form with well-documented connections to critiques of Victorian class structures and economic hardship. As well, the musical versions of the story by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (1979), including the 2007 film by Tim Burton, have been identified with anti-capitalist sentiment. In all the discussions of Sweeney Todd and class, however, surprisingly little scholarly attention is paid to the first sound film version of the story, which appeared in Britain at the height of the economic crisis of the 1930s: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), directed by George King and starring Tod Slaughter. The King-Slaughter collaborations converting Victorian stage melodramas to screen were part of the body of 1930s films identified as ‘quota quickies’, which have been characterised as cheap and badly made. Scholars such as Rachel Low and, more recently, David Pirie dismissed the quota quickies as films unworthy of close attention, but this article joins the revisionist trend that takes issue with these judgements both of 1930s quota quickies and the films of King and Slaughter. King's Sweeney Todd responds to the bleak economic experience and anxieties of its audiences through its narrative and generic changes to its Victorian precursors, as well as through its limited but creative uses of film form. Specifically, King's film challenges the idea of the naturalised authority of the wealthy, questions the origins of wealth and the function of labour, and transforms the abject body of the horror genre into a metaphor for the circulation of capital.

An Evidence-Based Approach to Class Action Reform in Australia: Competing Class Actions and Comparative Perspectives on the Volume of Class Action Litigation in Australia

2018 is the most crucial year for the future of class actions in Australia. The Victorian Government is currently considering a report on the litigation funding industry and certain aspects of Victorian class actions recently completed by the Victorian Law Reform Commission. The Australian Law Reform Commission will be completing in December 2018 its review of litigation funders and certain aspects of the federal class action regime. Empirical data is required to ensure that these reviews, and the assessment of the recommendations that come out of these reviews, are based on an accurate understanding of Australia's class actions landscape. This is the main aim of this and other empirical reports that will be released over the next 12 months.

�WEALTH OR LOVE, WHAT DOES A WOMAN WANT?� AN IRONIC LOOK AT THE MIDDLE CLASS NORMS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE�S JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre is a novel written in the early nineteenth century (1847). It depicts the English society of the upper, middle and lower class and their habits and attitudes towards life. The opening of the novel points to social class, wealth and marriage as its major theme. Throughout the novel, the relationship between social awareness of class and marriage, especially dealing with money or property are highlighted, the reason why society tends to consider about social class, money and property in finding a suitable partner to marry. This paper relies on the examples from the novel to show how nineteenth-century women imagined their marriage. In terms of women�s social rights and roles, Charlotte Bronte tries to open readers' eyes to the idea that women's abilities should not be limited only to the sphere of the family. Bronte�s novel does not only attack Victorian class structure but also the issue of gender. �Keywords : marriage, wealth, property, women�s roles, gender

Rugby, Football and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian York. By Charles WalterMasters. Borthwick Institute Publications. University of York. 72pp. £10.00.

Rugby, Football and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian York. By Charles WalterMasters. Borthwick Institute Publications. University of York. 72pp. £10.00.

The Triumph of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Over Comte’s Positivism in George Gissing’s Early Writing

AbstractGeorge Gissing (1857–1903) is one of the most rewarding and unsettling of the English writers of fiction associated with literary realism in the late nineteenth century. His early novels – beginning with Workers in the Dawn (1880) and culminating with The Nether World (1889) – dramatize the life of the suffering poor but also the anguished intellectual outcast, with whom he identified and saw as a victim of the deep‐rooted Victorian class system and its equally entrenched hypocrisy. During his stormy early life Gissing engaged enthusiastically with socialism and at the same time he was drawn to the Positivist creed espoused by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Almost immediately, however, he became disenchanted with Comte’s “religion of humanity” and developed a much darker disposition, strongly inflected by the aestheticism and ascetic detachment from the world and the “Will,” as advocated by the Pessimism of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In this essay I argue that this apparently paradoxical philosophical volte face was inevitable from the outset and that Pessimism was always the dominant force in Gissing’s life. However, although Gissing embraced Schopenhauer’s aesthetic vision for artistic genius, he rarely achieved the asceticism on which Pessimism was founded; his anger and bitterness towards the hypocrisy of late‐Victorian society stayed with him to the very end. Nevertheless, among contemporary, like‐minded writers of fiction, including Thomas Hardy,George Meredith, George Moore, and Arthur Morrison, Gissing stands out as the Apostle of Pessimism.

'A Victorian Class Conflict?': Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837-1902, by John T. Smith

'A Victorian Class Conflict?': Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837-1902, by John T. Smith

Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain by Victoria Kelley

Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain by Victoria Kelley

Soap and water: cleanliness, dirt and the working classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

This book is based on a body of research investigating the visual and material culture of the Victorian and Edwardian working classes. It focuses in particular on issues of cleanliness and dirt, which are understood as both material practices and as a complex set of discourses around domesticity, respectability, motherhood, the body and personal subjectivity. The book deals with this subject in three chapters, looking at 'official' discourses around cleanliness and dirt (advice literature and government publications), the actual practice of routines of cleanliness within the home (using autobiographical and social observation sources as evidence) and the development of commercial imagery around cleanliness, as soap became a heavily branded and advertised product. The book is original because of this cross-referencing of sources, and because it pays detailed attention to working-class material culture of the period, which is usually neglected in favour of analyses of middle- or upper-class domesticity. Although this book has a strong social history content, it is fundamentally concerned with the materiality and representation of social life: the research methods used include those of design history and material culture history, with more 'traditional' documentary sources set alongside objects (the branding, packaging and advertising ephemera of soap). The following conference papers and talks have disseminated this research: • ‘Soap Stories: mothers, homes and the tasks of cleanliness in working-class autobiography’, Social History Society Conference, University of Manchester, April 2011 • ‘Dirt, Sweat and Tears: how soap advertisements spread fear of dirt and germs and a rhetoric of hygiene’, public talk in association with Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life exhibition, Wellcome Collection, July 2011 • ‘ “When he died I was hoping it wasn’t contagious”: disease and domestic hygiene, c.1880 – 1914’, King’s College London, History of Health and Medicine seminar, May 2013

<em>Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain</em>, by Victoria Kelley

<em>Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain</em>, by Victoria Kelley

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island

Hardy versus Wessex

Abstract Hardy's distinctive creation, the world he called Wessex, has, in recent years, been increasingly regarded as a dubious construction too often used by critics in the liberal humanist tradition as the basis for seeing the Wessex Novels as mythic or tragic narratives. Materialist critics such as Goode, Fisher, Widdowson, and Wotton have argued that the effect of such readings has been to mask the social and economic practices and pressures, rooted in the Victorian class system, that are central to Hardy's novels. These critics often argue that the Wessex Novels identify both the dominating influence of class conflict in their representations of actual experience as well as Hardy's own deflections of his insights into that experience. The present essay supports the materialist critics to some extent but rejects the reduction of Wessex to a socioeconomic stage. The work of Raymond Williams is used as a critical discourse whose initiatives can enable us to see a different Wessex, one that confronts an...

'A Victorian class conflict?': schoolteaching and the parson, priest and minister, 1837-1902

'A Regeneration of the Parish': Wellsprings of Clergy Interest in Elementary Schooling 'The Real Milch-cow': The Clergyman's Role in the Elementary Schools 'The Parson's Fag': The Schoolteacher as the Servant of the Church in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Merely a Growing Dilemma of Etiquette?: The Deepening Gulf Between the Victorian Clergyman and Victorian Schoolteacher 'Educating our Masters': The Educational Background of Clergyman and Schoolteacher 'The Unlucky Jar': The Straining of Relationships Between Clergymen and Schoolteachers in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 'An Enemy Within': The Clergymen and the Board Schools, 1870-1902 'The Old Gods Crumble...' Index.

<em>‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’ Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837–1902</em>, by John T. Smith

<em>‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’ Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837–1902</em>, by John T. Smith

‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’: Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837–1902. By John T. Smith. Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic, 2009. viii + 233 pp. $70.00 cloth.

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‘THE RAIN IN SPAIN STAYS MAINLY IN THE PLAIN’

As is known, ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ is a famous line from George Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion (1912), a witty and highly entertaining study of Victorian class distinctions and social conventions. Broadly speaking, my aim is to exploit the cultural credentials of both the work and its celebrated rhyme by using them as a rhetorical device from which to stake out the position of cultural studies within the Spanish university. The approach I will advance tries to take account of the principles listed by Cary Nelson in his cultural manifesto (1996, pp. 273–86), even though it derives more directly from the immediate conditions of higher education in Spain and specifically from my own experience as a university teacher. As I hope to demonstrate, several connections may be established between ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ and the difficulties that arise in trying to speak/write about cultural studies. Likewise, the rhyme as well as certain details in the comedy's plot can serve as useful cultural analogies for some of the ‘meta-problems’ faced by cultural studies in the Spanish context. And more crucially, the famous line can be put to use in the classroom as a helpful, eye-opening exercise for future cultural agents or ‘producers’ (Striphas, 1998: 457). I shall therefore move from problems of discourse, to inherent power structures and finally unto the actual practice of cultural studies.