Download or read book The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians written by F. David Roberts and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-07 with total page 1098 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1830, the dominant social outlook of the early Victorians was a paternalism that looked to property, the Church, and local Justices of the Peace to govern society and deal with its ills. By 1860, however, the dominant social outlook had become a vision of a laissez faire society that relied on economic laws, self-reliance, and the vigorous philanthropy of voluntary societies. This book describes and analyzes these changes, which arose from the rapid growth of industry, towns, population, and the middle and working classes. Paternalism did not entirely fade away, however, just as a laissez faire vision had long antedated 1830. Both were part of a social conscience also defined by a revived philanthropy, a new humanitarianism, and a grudging acceptance of an expanded government, all of which reflected a strong revival of religion as well as the growth of rationalism. The new dominance of a laissez faire vision was dramatically evident in the triumph of political economy. By 1860, only a few doubted the eternal verities of the economists’ voluminous writings. Few also doubted the verities of those who preached self-reliance, who supported the New Poor Law’s severity to persons who were not self-reliant, and who inspired education measures to promote that indispensable virtue. If economic laws and self-reliance failed to prevent distress, the philanthropists and voluntary societies would step in. Such a vision proved far more buoyant and effective than a paternalism whose narrow and rural Anglican base made it unable to cope with the downside of an industrial-urban Britain. But the vision of a laissez faire society was not without its flaws. Its harmonious economic laws and its hope in self-reliance did not prevent gross exploitation and acute distress, and however beneficent were its philanthropists, they fell far short of mitigating these evils. This vision also found a rival in an expanded government. Two powerful ideas—the idea of a paternal government and the idea of a utilitarian state—helped create the expansion of government services. A reluctant belief in governmental power thus joined the many other ideas that defined the Victorian’s social conscience.
Download or read book The Emerging Victorian Social Conscience written by Roger Peyton Wallins and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victorian social conscience written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Making of a Tory Evangelical written by David Furse-Roberts and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-03-08 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of Victorian Britain's pre-eminent social reformers, Lord Shaftesbury (1801-85) exerted a lasting impact surpassing all of his parliamentary contemporaries. Despite being born into one of England's aristocratic families, a combination of early childhood deprivation, an earnest Evangelical faith, and an abiding sense of noblesse oblige made him a champion of the poor. His seminal contribution to the Victorian factory reform movement represented just one of his manifold legacies. This contextual study of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury probes the mind behind the man to evaluate the religious and philosophical ideas, and their leading figures, that ignited his lifelong activism in the public sphere. This book reveals that far from representing a relic of the Victorian age, the Earl of Shaftesbury, whilst a conservative by predilection, was essentially a forward-looking and farsighted reformer. The principles that Shaftesbury espoused of industrial justice, class harmony, subsidiarity, volunteerism, selfless individualism, religious observance, strong families and private enterprise tempered by moderate state intervention are essentially those prized by liberal democracies today as the foundation for social cohesion, prosperity, and human flourishing.
Download or read book A Mad Bad and Dangerous People written by Boyd Hilton and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.
Download or read book A Passion for Society written by Iain Wilkinson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does human suffering mean for society? And how has this meaning changed from the past to the present? In what ways does Òthe problem of sufferingÓ serve to inspire us toÊÊcare for others? How does our response to suffering reveal our moral and social conditions? In this trenchant work, Arthur KleinmanÑa renowned figure in medical anthropologyÑand Iain Wilkinson, an award-winning sociologist, team up to offer some answers to these profound questions. A Passion for SocietyÊinvestigates the historical development and current state of social science with a focus on how this development has been shaped in response to problems of social suffering. Following a line of criticism offered by key social theorists and cultural commentators who themselves were unhappy with the professionalization of social science, Wilkinson and Kleinman provide a critical commentary on how studies ofÊÊsociety have moved from an original concern with social suffering and its amelioration to dispassionate inquiries. The authors demonstrate how social action throughÊÊcaring for others is revitalizing and remaking the discipline of social science, and they examine the potential for achieving greater understanding though a moral commitment to the practice of care for others. In this deeply considered work, Wilkinson and Kleinman argue for an engaged social science that connects critical thought with social action, that seeks to learn through caregiving, and that operates with a commitment to establish and sustain humane forms of society.
Download or read book The Victorian Conscience written by Clarence R Decker and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sociological study of nineteenth century England explores the values and beliefs of the Victorian middle class, touching on topics such as religion, gender roles, and social class. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Perfection the State and Victorian Liberalism written by D. Malachuk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recovers and recommends the core conviction of Victorian liberal theory that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection. The first half of the book considers the diverse modern biases that have blinded us to the merit of this core conviction and weaves together disparate new scholarship (primarily in political theory and Victorian Studies) to set the stage for a reconsideration of that conviction. The second half of the book is that reconsideration outlining the various policies the Victorian liberals (John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, primarily, with a half dozen other nineteenth-century British and American authors) recommended the state employ in the perfection of human beings.
Download or read book Paternalism in Early Victorian England written by David Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1979. This book studies the social outlook which historians today call paternalism. It was an ideology which informed social attitudes at all levels of society and expressed itself in countless ways. In this work, David Roberts provides a comprehensive examination of the revival, amplification, and transformation of the ideals of paternalism as a social remedy in the Early Victorian Period. This title will be of interest to students of history.
Download or read book Opposing Australia s First Assisted Immigrants 1832 42 written by Melanie Burkett and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unravels the paradoxical denigration of the first significant group of free (non-convict), working-class emigrants to the Australian colony of New South Wales in the 1830s. Though their labour was sorely needed, the colonial elite rejected the new arrivals on the grounds that they were ‘lazy’ and ‘immoral’. These criticisms stemmed from political, economic, and cultural motivations that ultimately sought to protect, legitimise, and cement the elite’s financial and social hegemony. The author seeks to explore the ulterior motives behind the public denouncements of immigrants by exposing the conflicting and opportunistic rationales used. Brought to Australia from Britain and Ireland through the experiment of ‘government-assisted migration,’ these immigrants are often remembered as ‘brave pioneers’ today, but this book exposes the deep antagonistic attitudes toward immigration that remain entrenched in Australian society. Uncovering early forms of class antagonism in Australia, this book presents useful insights for those researching Australian history and migration studies, as well as scholars of colonial history, by providing a model for re-evaluating and confronting a long-standing pattern in most settler societies: hostility toward immigrants.
Download or read book Overcoming Matthew Arnold written by James Walter Caufield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.
Download or read book Victorians Against the Gallows written by James Gregory and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time that Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the list of crimes liable to attract the death penalty had effectively been reduced to murder. Yet, despite this, the gallows remained a source of controversy in Victorian Britain and there was a growing unease in liberal quarters surrounding the question of capital punishment. Unease was expressed in various forms, including efforts at outright abolition. Focusing in part on the activities of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, James Gregory here examines abolitionist strategies, leaders and personnel. He locates the 'gallows question' in an imperial context and explores the ways in which debates about the gallows and abolition featured in literature, from poetry to 'novels of purpose' and popular romances of the underworld. He places the abolitionist movement within the wider Victorian worlds of philanthropy, religious orthodoxy and social morality in a study which will be essential reading for students and researchers of Victorian history.
Download or read book Emotional Histories in the Fight to End Prostitution written by Michele Renée Greer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the ongoing fight to end prostitution through a historical study of its emotional communities. An issue that has long been the subject of much debate amongst feminists, governments and communities alike, the history of the fight to end prostitution has an important bearing on feminist politics today. This book identifies key abolitionist emotional communities, tracing their origins, interactions and evolutions with various historical and contemporary emotional styles. In doing do, Emotional Histories in the Fight to End Prostitution highlights a more nuanced view of the movement's history. From Moral Liberals in 19th century Britain to the American anti-pornography movement and Swedish 'Nordic Model', Emotional Histories in the Fight to End Prostitution shows how emotional styles and practices have influenced the evolution of the fight against prostitution in Britain, the United States and Western Europe. From the fear of sin, to maternal compassion and survivor shame and loss, Michele Greer historicizes emotions and studies them as dynamic forms of situated knowledge. In doing so, she sheds light on how women's lived experiences have been transformed and politicized, and raises important questions around how feminist emotions in social protest can not only challenge but unknowingly defend existing socio-political conventions and inequalities. Highlighting the links between past and present forms of abolitionism, it shows that this connection is more complex and far-reaching than currently assumed, and offers new perspectives on the history of emotions.
Download or read book Reform Acts written by Chris Vanden Bossche and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Victorian novels imagined the idea of social agency. Reform Acts offers a new approach to prominent questions raised in recent studies of the novel. By examining social agency from a historical rather than theoretical perspective, Chris R. Vanden Bossche investigates how particular assumptions involving agency came into being. Through readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian literature, he demonstrates that the Victorian tension between reform and revolution framed conceptions of agency in ways that persist in our own time. Vanden Bossche argues that Victorian novels sought to imagine new forms of social agency evolving from Chartism, the dominant working-class movement of the time. Novelists envisioned alternative forms of social agency by employing contemporary discourses from Chartism's focus on suffrage as well as the means through which it sought to obtain it, such as moral versus physical force, land reform, and the cooperative movement. Each of the three parts of Reform Acts begins with a chapter that analyzes contemporary conversations and debates about social agency in the press and in political debate. Succeeding chapters examine how novels envision ways of effecting social change, for example, class alliance in Barnaby Rudge; landed estates as well as finely graded hierarchy and politicians in Coningsby and Sybil; and reforming trade unionism in Mary Barton and North and South. By including novels written from a range of political perspectives, Vanden Bossche discovers patterns in Victorian thinking that are easily recognized in today’s assumptions about social hierarchy.
Download or read book Women Infanticide and the Press 1822 1922 written by Nicola Goc and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of knowledge, of 'facts' and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ’the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide. At the same time, infanticide news stories shaped how women who killed their babies were known and understood in ways that pathologised their actions. This, in turn, influenced medical, judicial, and welfare policies regar
Download or read book Icelandic Utopia in Victorian Travel Literature written by Dimitrios Kassis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on Iceland as a nineteenth-century utopian locus in the light of racial theories attached to the country’s national framework. In particular, it investigates the ways in which five nineteenth-century travellers define their national identity and gender in relation to Iceland during the Victorian period, during which European nationalism emerges as an idea of paramount importance. Owing to the gradual contemplation of this peripheral word as the cradle of the Germanic nations, Victorian travel writers endeavoured to reconstruct the image of Iceland in accordance with the racial theoretical framework that underlay the nineteenth-century British nation-building agenda.
Download or read book Meat Commerce and the City written by Robyn S Metcalfe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the struggle between Smithfield market's supporters and detractors and argues that this demonstrates a major shift in the way the urban landscape came to be used.
