Collections Essay Social Class / Importance of novels / Inequality Flashcards
Order of paragraphs
- Comparing rich & poor lifestyles
- Prohibition of education for the poor
- Lack of discourse
- Offering a new education
- High Art vs Low Art
- Fictitiousness of the novel = fictitiousness of social class
Quotes on differing quality of life for rich & poor (11)
-“Killing airs and gases”
-“Innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel”
-“Narrow court upon court, close street upon street”
VS
-“In the formal drawing room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug, warming himself before the fire, Mr Bounderby”
“Haunches of Venison, stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly”
VS
“Returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to find his boy a corpse”
“His jewels, his plates, his valuables” - “Five shillings”
VS
Carson Jr. “Finished his breakfast, stood up and pulled 5 shillings out of his pocket, which he gave to Wilson as he passed him, the poor fellow”
Raymond Williams - Culture & Society - Mary Barton offers the most powerful presentation of “the industrial sufferings of the 1840s”
Marcus Engels - Manchester was unique in the systematic way in which the “working class were barred from the streets”
Average wage in 1840s was 20-30 shillings/month for a labourer in London; barely enough to afford rent - and it was less in the provinces
30,000 homeless children in London in 1848
Prohibition of education (8)
“Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else.”
“Education at Christminster was like old wine in new bottles”
“New doctors emerged, their red and black gowned forms passing across Jude’s vision like inaccessible planets”
“Sir, I have read your letter with interest; and judging from your description of yourself as a working man, I venture to think that your best chance of success be by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Faithfully, T TETUPHANY. To Mr J Fawley stonemason.”
1870s Oxford refused entry to working class applicants
Ruskin university, which offered places to men with few, or no qualifications opened in 1899
French Revolution 1789-1799 spread fear of working class uprisings across Europe
Myron Magnet - Dickens & the Social Order: Education in Hard Times, “though not utterly negligent, was rather stifling”
Limitation of discourse (8)
Raymond Williams - Culture & Society - John Barton’s murder of Harry Carson breakdown sympathy for the working class and “dramatised fears of violence widespread amongst the middle and upper classes”
Elizabeth Gaskell claimed that the purpose of writing Mary Barton was to produce a “translation” across classes
E.G’s husband’s knowledge and research into Lancashire dialect and etymology helped Gaskell include such words in the novel, often which were grounded from Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman
John Barton: “As long as I live I shall curse them as so cruelly refused to hear us, but I’ll speak of it no more”
Stephen Blackpool: “I were very patient wi’her. I tried to wean her fra’t ower and ower agen”
Crony union members take the voice of the “Hands” and don’t allow them a voice
Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield burned a copy of Jude the Obscure
1832 Reform Act saw numbers of voters increase from 500,000 to 813,000, now making up 1 in 5 men in the UK
Provision of a new education (4)
Tinker Taylor: “I always saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in it”
“I had proved my - my system to myself, and I have rigidly administered it; and I must bear responsibility for its failure”
“The thquire (A) thtood (B) by you (C) Thethilia and now I’ll (C) thtand (B) by the thquire (A)
VS
“Have you a heart?”
“The circulation, sir, could not be carried without one”
High Art vs Low Art (8)
1840: 65% of men and 50% of women were literate
Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield burned a copy of Jude the Obscure
Many critics claim Hardy’s decision to stop writing novels was influenced in part by the criticism of Jude
Myron Magnet: Dickins and the Social Order
“For Dickens, art had no rarefied, Pater-like claims. For him, it was a pre-eminently social, even popular, matter of shared emotion and shared significance, and consequently it had to keep both feet on the ground”
1837-1901: 60,000 novels produced
1837: 20% of book production was towards novels
1901: 60% of book production was towards novels
Moodie's Libraries: Offered books in stock if they were formed of triple-decker series --> Library subscription far cheaper than buying the books individually so encouraged a growing working class to be exposed to books
Novel fiction representative of social fiction (2)
” ‘Show me a dissatisfied hand and I’ll show you a man that’s fit for anything bad.
Another of the popular fictions of Coketown, which some pains had been taken to disseminate, and some people really believed’ “
Myron Magnet: Dickens and the Social Order:
“Human culture devised to make sense out of reality’s apparent disorder”
