Working Class - Key period in forming working class - Industrialisation, urbanisation, trade unions raking of f in late 19thC. - Developments in working class leisure - football - Identity is external to working class and imposed by observers form 'outside' - Thomp- son, believed it naturally came into existence - What does class mean? How is it formed? - Marxist historiography - ascribed to by middle-class - Did working class individuals feel associated with a certain identity? - Work was an obsession with Victorians, not just economy, but for moral - Work = honesty, morality - Thomas Carlyle - work is religiously ordained, responsibility to God to work hard. "All true work is religion" "sacred" "divineness". By using hands, performing a religious task. - "The man is now a man" - correlation between masculine identity and manual labour - Everyone has the responsibility to work, but dif ferent kinds of work, intellectual or man- ual, all important. One should f ind virtue in working. - Independence, self-reliance - Victorian art also represents ideas of work, celebration of physical labour - Social harmony- everyone knows their place, working together for same social goals - Hicks - class, gender, social stereotypes, work passed onto generations, shows how it provides - Bell Scott - men are working in harmony, wealth and happiness it produces - Painted Charles Trevellian - middle-class man would never had picked up a hammer but painted in for social point. - Romanticised idea of the working-class - New form of social class - proletariat - Wages decrease due to labour competition - Marx and Engles - Industrialisation, working classes involved in a revolutionary struggle, conscious of common enemy (bourgeoisie) - Consequence of capitalist society - North and South - evidence of class warfare - Question of why a revolution didn't occur in Britain - Hobsbawm - top of working classes, labour aristocracy, hostile to rest of working-class, argument for why they don't become revolutionary - Reid believes there's lots of dif f erences in earnings, class, culture - Structures become quite small, normal for workshops to remain small, instead of a large factory - Average number - 29 workers - Explains why trade unions took so long to appear in the 80's - Time where British Labour Party is struggling
- Feminists historians - believe tradition historians have been obsessed with what men participate in, what men work in, male-based idea of what social class is based around being a man. - Women's experience of class and work ignored. - Millions of Victorian women worked - teachers, innkeepers, cotton and textile workers, majority of work force in Lancashire cotton trade. - Domestic about was single biggest source of labour - Married women - home could be a place of work - Laundry, ironing, taking in lodgers - Trade Unions restricted women's opportunities in the work force - Changed idea of what it means to be working class - Class is not only form of identity - religion, race