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"Middle class England Fiction"
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Be It Ever So Humble
Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system's functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the laborer's cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity,Be It Ever So Humbleposits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, many participants in discussions about poverty management came to believe that private family dwellings could turn England's indigent, unemployed, and discontent into a self-sufficient, productive, and patriotic labor force. Writers and thinkers involved in these debates produced copious descriptions of what a private home was and how it related to the collective national home. In this body of texts, Scott MacKenzie pursues the origins of the modern middle-class home through an extensive set of discourses-including philosophy, law, religion, economics, and aesthetics-all of which brush up against and often spill over into literary representations.
Through close readings, the author substantiates his claim that the private home was first invented for the poor and that only later did the middle class appropriate it to themselves. Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in home's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images.
eBook
Essays in Defence of the Female Sex
Letters, diaries, memoirs, conduct books and early feminist pamphlets: Essays in Defence of the Female Sex: Custom, Education, and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England is a two-part, text-based volume on the pivotal figures and most distinctive, sometimes contradictory, aspects of the querelle des femmes in Stuart England. Background information is given through male and especially female-authored sources, while the close analysis of [Hanna Woolley]s, Bathsua Makins, Marry Astells,.
eBook
Keep the aspidistra flying
'Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.' Gordon Comstock decides to live in poverty rather than compromise with the 'money god'. Disgusted by society's materialism, he leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' is widely viewed as a key transitional text in Orwell's career.
Book
Ruralism, Masculinity, and National Identity: The Rambling Clerk in Fiction, 1900–1940
This article examines the place of the literary lower-middle-class clerk in the English landscape between ca. 1900 and 1940. It draws attention to “clerical literature”—as typified in works by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Shan Bullock—and, more specifically, a subgenre that signposts the emergent interest in getting “back to the land.” At the heart of this subgenre of “rambling fiction,” the male clerical protagonist not only engages with the natural landscape on a journey through rural England but also explores notions of masculinity, heritage, and national identity. By focusing on middlebrow works, largely those written by former clerks themselves, this article argues that clerks were pioneers in drawing connections between a re-masculating exposure to the great outdoors—necessary for suburban, domesticated, office workers—and an appreciation of a particular palimpsest of England's history. In doing so, the clerk helped to popularize the continued association of medievalism, the South of England, and the rural “idyll.”
Journal Article
In the falling snow
Estranged from his entire family and accused of harassment by a colleague, social worker and race advocate Keith struggles with growing fears about the pointlessness of his work while tracing the events that have led to his present state.
Book
POPULAR READING AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN BRITAIN, 1850s–1940s
‘What do the masses read?’ After popular literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of literary figures and social researchers took it upon themselves to answer this question. Middle-class inquirers sought in newsagents' wares a vicarious connection with the culture and values of the readers of popular fiction. Many of these investigators, from Wilkie Collins in the 1850s to George Orwell in the 1930s, practised a form of literary criticism that doubled as social criticism. Other students of popular reading – Florence Bell in her study of early twentieth-century Middlesbrough and Mass-Observation in its surveys of reading during the Second World War – worked at the margins of British traditions of social research. Critics working from the texts of popular fiction tended to concentrate on questions of style and ideology; those doing fieldwork focused on reading as a social practice. Examining the corpus of studies of popular literacy from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain.
Journal Article
The northern clemency
The Northern Clemency begins at the perimeter of a late-summer party, amidst a din of neighbors gossiping one moment and navigating awkward silences the next. But once you encounter the Glover family--in particular, their languidly handsome teenage son Daniel--there's no turning back.
Book
WOMEN AND WHITE-COLLAR CRIME: Debates on Gender, Fraud and the Corporate Economy in England and America, 1850—1930
In Victorian society, women of the middle class were particularly vulnerable to white-collar crimes. Denied opportunities to earn their own living, single women were especially dependent on invested capital. Women, in fact, made up a significant portion of investors during the nineteenth century, especially in such key areas of the economy as banking, railways and insurance. Yet, bourgeois notions of gentility required that women remain ignorant of money matters and refrain from active participation in business affairs, leaving women especially exposed to all manner of fraud and malfeasance. This article uses financial literature, newspaper debates and popular fiction to demonstrate how women were victimized by white-collar crime. Women's financial victimization was a common theme of the popular press, economic journals and fiction. These discourses contributed to a feminist discourse of economic and political empowerment, and suffragists and other progressives argued that women had to reform an economy and financial system in which they were both marginalized and deeply implicated.
Journal Article