In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into ...popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality.
The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another.
Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them.
By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was ‘mapped’ by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end ...of the World War II, ‘underground writing’ created an imaginative world beneath the streets of London. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security.
The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the 1920s & 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2.
The approach takes a broadly cultural studies perspective, crossing the boundaries of transport history, literature and London/ urban studies. It draws mainly on fiction but also uses poetry, art, journals, postcards and posters to illustrate. It links the actual underground trains, tracks and stations to the metaphorical world of ‘underground writing’ and places the writing in a social/ political context.
The Class Sonia Livingstone; Julian Sefton-Green
05/2016, Volume:
1
eBook
Open access
Do today's youth have more opportunities than their parents? As they build their own social and digital networks, does that offer new routes to learning and friendship? How do they navigate the ...meaning of education in a digitally connected but fiercely competitive, highly individualized world?
Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school,The Classexamines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers' perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds-in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons. By portraying the texture of the students' everyday lives,The Classseeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy. Providing insights into how young people's social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them, Livingstone and Sefton-Green reveal that the experience of disconnections and blocked pathways is often more common than that of connections and new opportunities.
Arguing that the commercial stage depended on the unprecedented demographic growth and commercial vibrancy of London to fuel its own development, Jean E. Howard posits a particular synergy between ...the early modern stage and the city in which it flourished. In London comedy, place functions as the material arena in which social relations are regulated, urban problems negotiated, and city space rendered socially intelligible. Rather than simply describing London, the stage participated in interpreting it and giving it social meaning. Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular place within the city-the Royal Exchange, the Counters, London's whorehouses, and its academies of manners-and examines the theater's role in creating distinctive narratives about each. In these stories, specific locations are transformed into venues defined by particular kinds of interactions, whether between citizen and alien, debtor and creditor, prostitute and client, or dancing master and country gentleman. Collectively, they suggest how city space could be used and by whom, and they make place the arena for addressing pressing urban problems: demographic change and the influx of foreigners and strangers into the city; new ways of making money and losing it; changing gender roles within the metropolis; and the rise of a distinctive "town culture" in the West End. Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four decades of a defining era of theater history,Theater of a Cityshows how the stage imaginatively shaped and responded to the changing face of early modern London.
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture.Music Hall and Modernitydemonstrates how such pioneering cultural ...critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of "the people."In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.Music Hall and Modernityoffers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.
We are often told that the Victorians were far less violent than their forebears: over the course of the nineteenth century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, violent crime, including homicide, ...notably declined, and punishments were hidden from public view within prison walls. They were also much more respectable, and actively sought orderly, uplifting, domestic and refined pastimes. Yet these were the very same people who celebrated the exceptionally violent careers of anti-heroes such as the brutal puppet Punch and the murderous barber Sweeney Todd. By drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements patronised by ordinary Londoners this book challenges our understanding of Victorian society and culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, 're-enactments' of high level violence flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers.
Cultural Capitals Newman, Karen
2021, 2007, 2021-06-08, 20070101
eBook
Social theories of modernity focus on the nineteenth century as the period when Western Europe was transformed by urbanization. Cities became thriving metropolitan centers as a result of economic, ...political, and social changes wrought by the industrial revolution. In Cultural Capitals, Karen Newman demonstrates that speculation and capital, the commodity, the crowd, traffic, and the street, often thought to be historically specific to nineteenth- century urban culture, were in fact already at work in early modern London and Paris. Newman challenges the notion of a rupture between premodern and modern societies and shows how London and Paris became cultural capitals. Drawing upon poetry, plays, and prose by writers such as Shakespeare, Scudéry, Boileau, and Donne, as well as popular materials including pamphlets, ballads, and broadsides, she examines the impact of rapid urbanization on cultural production. Newman shows how changing demographics and technological development altered these two emerging urban centers in which new forms of cultural capital were produced and new modes of sociability and representation were articulated. Cultural Capitals is a fascinating work of literary and cultural history that redefines our conception of when the modern city came to be and brings early modern London and Paris alive in all their splendor, squalor, and richness.
Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume series, The Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903), is a staple of late Victorian social history and a monumental work of scholarship. Despite these ...facts, historians have paid little attention to its section on religious influences. Thomas Gibson-Brydon’s The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London seeks to remedy this neglect. Combing through the interviews Booth and his researchers conducted with 1,800 churchmen and women, Gibson-Brydon not only brings to life a cast of characters – from “Jesusist" vicars to Peckham Rye preachers to women drinkers – but also uncovers a city-wide audit of charitable giving and philanthropic practices. Discussing the philosophy of Booth, the genesis of his Religious Influences Series, and the agents and recipients of London charity, this study is a frank testimony on British moral segregation at the turn of the century. In critiquing the idea of working-class solidarity and community-building traditionally portrayed by many leading social and labour historians, Gibson-Brydon displays a meaner, bleaker reality in London’s teeming neighbourhoods. Demonstrating the wealth of untapped information that can be gleaned from Booth’s archives, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London raises new questions about working-class communities, cultures, urbanization, and religion at the height of the British Empire.
In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of
the new-the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and
our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on
...many of today's communications tech workers mirror those of a much
earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the
London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive
telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth
century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely
on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for
seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing
thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly
unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth
operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and
app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a
history of information service work embedded in the daily
maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early
years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows,
the administrators and engineers who crafted these
telecommunications systems created networks according to
conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling
the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and
servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone
operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their
crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to
their marginalized status-from organizing labor strikes to
participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways,
these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network
into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways
familiar today.
Unequal City Hamnett, Chris
2003, 20040601, 2004-06-01, 20020101, 20030101
eBook
Unequal City examines some of the dramatic economic and social changes that have taken place in London over the last forty years. It describes how London's changing industrial structure, particularly ...the shift from an industrial to a services-based city, and the associated changes in occupational class structure and in the structure of earnings and incomes, have worked through to the housing market and the gentrification of large parts of inner London. Unequal City relates to the literature on global cities. The book has a wide sweep and summarises a wide range of literature on occupational and industrial change, earnings and incomes and the housing market and gentrification. It provides a wealth of original data, figures, maps and tables and will be a valuable reference for anyone interested in the changes that have reshaped the social structure of London in recent decades.
