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“Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2009

Ellen Ross
Ellen Ross
Affiliation:
Ramapo State College
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Extract

The debate over the British labor aristocracy has been, since Eric Hobsbawm's “Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” a litmus test of changes in the political assumptions of successive cohorts of labor historians. Hobsbawm, writing as a Marxist in the cold war era, was (and remains) convinced that “membership” in this privileged stratum was mainly a question of wages, skill, and degree of unionization. In the 1970s, under New Left impetus, working-class culture more generally began to excite more interest; scholars began to look beyond the workplace for evidence of the kinds of divisions between workers—captured in the term respectability—which Hobsbawm pointed to in work-related spheres. Earlier concerns with occupational hierarchies, wages, and workplace associations have been supplemented by studies of friendly society membership, intermarriage between occupational groups, residential patterns, thrift, recreation, and so on.

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Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 27 , Spring 1985 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1985

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References

NOTES

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60. Family Life Archive, no. 225, 61.

61. “Fierce Questions and Taunts,” 583Google Scholar.; also Family Life Archive, no. 299, 45; and East London Observer, 6 07 1897, 7.Google Scholar

62. See Davidoff, Leonore, “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 1 (Summer 1974): 406–28Google Scholar. John Gillis has rightly cautioned (personal communication, fall 1983) that cleanliness is not a strictly bourgeois trait; a long tradition of female pride in household order dates back to preindustrial England.

63. Martin, Anna, “The Mother and Social Reform,” parts 1 and 2, The Nineteenth Century and After 73 and 74 (05 and 06, 1913): 1060–79, 1235–55Google Scholar. Anna Davin's forthcoming dissertation (University of London), “Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century London,” deals extensively with pressure by the schools on working-class London families, as does Rubinstein, David, School Attendance in London 1870–1904: A Social History (Hull, 1969)Google Scholar. See also Hurt, J. S., Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes (London, 1979).Google Scholar

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65. Thane, , Foundations of the Welfare State, 76–78Google Scholar; Martin, , “Mother and Social Reform, II,” 1239–41.Google Scholar

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69. East London Observer, 16 11 1878, 7.Google Scholar

70. Booth manuscripts B/ 352, May 9, 1898, fol. 73; B/ 350, March 25, 1898, fol. 187.

71. Walkowitz, Judith R., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, England, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 1.

72. Family Life Archive, no. 284, 22, 47.

73. Mrs. S. (born in Hoxton in 1884), Samuel file.

74. David, , “Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century London.”Google Scholar

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76. Interview with Mrs. B. (born in 1882 near East India Dock Road) by Anna Davin, June–July 1973, typescript; Mrs. S., Samuel file; Free, , East End in the West, 7.Google Scholar

77. Family Life Archive, no. 92, 17.

78. Ibid., no. 333, 26.

79. Ibid., no. 299, 31.

80. Scannell, , Mother Knew Best, 69Google Scholar; “Childbirth in Greenwich Hospital 1930s and the Walworth Road Clinic,” Frances Widdowson, Goldsmith's College, dittoed. Other examples are found in Family Life Archive, no. 333, 26 and no. 229, 21; Foakes, , High Walls, 77–78Google Scholar; and Mr. and Mrs. M. (born in 1894 and 1905, respectively, in Hoxton), Samuel file.

81. This point is explained more fully in “Fierce Questions and Taunts.” The term “survival strategies” is Carol Stack's and is developed in her All Our Kin.

82. Tales of Mean Streets, 7th ed. (London, 1906).Google Scholar

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84. Family Life Archive, no. 236, 11, 67. Walker is a pseudonym.

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