Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:33:16.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Turning the Inside Out: Morals, Modes of Living, and the Condition of the Working Class

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John B. Lamb
John B. Lamb
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:

We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)

It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 39 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abrams, Philip. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834–1914. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.Google Scholar
“An Account of an Enquiry into the State of 275 Poor Families in the City of Bristol.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 1 (1838): 86–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Levin, Charles. St.Louis: Telos, 1981.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. “Chartism.” The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. Traill, H. D.. 30 vols. 1899. New York: AMS, 1980. 29: 118–204.Google Scholar
Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. 1842. Ed. Flinn, M.W.. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1965.Google Scholar
“Condition of the Working Class and the Factory Bill.” Westminster Review 18 (1833): 380–404.Google Scholar
Corrigan, Philip, and Sayer, Derek. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. London: Basil Blackwell, 1985.Google Scholar
Cullen, Michael J.The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian England. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Fuss, Diana. New York: Routledge, 1991. 93–116.Google Scholar
Elesh, David. “The Manchester Statistical Society: A Case Study of Discontinuity in the History of Empirical Social Research.” The Establishment of Empirical Sociology. Ed. Oberschall, Anthony. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. 31–72.Google Scholar
An Enquiry into the State of the Manufacturing Populations. London: 1831.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. “Withholding the missing portion: Power, meaning, and persuasion in Freud's ‘The Wolf-man’.” TLS 29 Aug. 1986: 935–38.Google Scholar
Flinn, M. W. Introduction. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. By Edwin Chadwick. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1965. 1–73.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M.. New York: Pantheon, 1972.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Strachey, James. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams.” Standard Edition. 15:199–212.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Construction in Analysis.” Standard Edition. 23: 255–69.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” Standard Edition. 17: 1–122.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. General Theory of the Neurosis. Standard Edition. 16: 243–463.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Preface to Reik's Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies.” Standard Edition. 17: 259–63.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition. 7: 123–245.Google Scholar
Gaskell, P. The Manufacturing Population of England. 1833. New York: Arno, 1972.Google Scholar
Gavin, Hector. The Habitations of the Industrial Classes. 1851. New York: Garland. 1985.Google Scholar
Ginswick, J., ed. Labour and the Poor in England and Wales 1849–51. 3 vols. London: Frank Cass, 1983.Google Scholar
Godwin, George. London Shadows: A Glance at the “Homes” of the Thousands. 1854. New York: Garland, 1985.Google Scholar
Goldman, Lawrence. “The Origins of British ‘Social Science’: Political Economy. Natural Science and Statistics, 1830–1835.” The Historical Journal 26 (1983): 587–616.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kay-Shuttleworth, James Phillips. The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes. 2nd ed. 1832. London: Frank Cass, 1970.Google Scholar
Laplanche, J., and Pontalis, J.-B.. The Language of Psycho-analysis. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. New York: Norton, 1973.Google Scholar
Lester, C. Edwards. The Glory and Shame of England. 2nd ed. 1866. Shannon, Ireland: Irish UP, 1971.Google Scholar
Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. “The Manufacturing Poor.” Fraser's Magazine 37 (1848): 1–16.Google Scholar
Pickstone, John V. “Ferriar's Fever to Kay's Cholera: Disease and Social Structure in Cottonopolis.” History of Science 22 (1984): 401–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poovey, Mary. “Curing the ‘Social Body’ in 1832: James Phillips Kay and the Irish in Manchester.” Gender and History 5 (Summer 1993): 196–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Procacci, Giovanna. “Social Economy and the Government of Poverty.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Eds. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991. 151–68.Google Scholar
“Report of a Committee of the Manchester Statistical Society on the Condition of the Working Classes in an Extensive Manufacturing District, in 1834, 1835, and 1836.” 1838. Repr. in Conditions of Work and Living. Ed. Carpenter, Kenneth E.. New York: Arno, 1972.Google Scholar
“Report on the Conditions of the Working Classes in the Town of Kingston-upon-Hull, by the Statistical Society of Manchester.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 5 (1842): 212–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roof, Judith. “The Erotic Travelogue: The Scopophilic Pleasure of Race vs. Gender.” Arizona Quarterly 47 (Winter 1991): 119–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sellek, R. J. W. James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider. Portland, OR: Wobum, 1994.Google Scholar
Taylor, W. Cooke. Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire. 1842. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968.Google Scholar