Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848-1914 / Edition 1

by Patrick Joyce

Overview

This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521447973
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/21/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.02(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Part I. Power and the People: Politics and the Social Order: 2. The languages of popular politics: from radicalism to Liberalism; 3. Class, populism and socialism: Liberalism and after; Part II. Moralising the Market: Work and the Social Order: 4. Civilising capital: class and the moral discources of labour; 5. Buiding the union: 'the gospel of absolute and perfect organisation'; Part III. Custom, History, Language: Popular Culture and the Social Order; 6. Custom and the symbolic structure of the social order; 7. The sense of the past; 8. The people's English; Part IV. Kingdoms of the Mind: The Imaginary Constitution of the Social Order: 9. Investigating popular art; 10. The broadside ballad; 11. The voice of the people? The character and development of dialect literature; 12. Dialect and the making of social identity; 13. Stages of class: popular theatre and the geography of belonging; 14. Summary and conclusion: the making of the English working class before 1914; Appendices.

Editorial Reviews

"...only the obdurate will reject outright the central claim of this important book or the utility of its heuristic devices." Albion

"...a powerful, path-breaking book....one of those rare books which urges that we should look at our past in a new way....Joyce's immensely stimulating book prompts a thousand enquiries." Times Higher Education Supplement

"The most substantial and sustained attempt yet to go beyond the orthodoxy of class....its achievement should be welcomed and celebrated." Journal of Historical Geography

"Visions of the People is provocative and sweeping...a book of the first importance." Journal of British Studies

"It will be a key point of reference for years to come." Social History

"Joyce describes a richly textured and deeply ambivalent working-class culture. The most significant aspect of the book is the interesting and innovative reading of diverse and varied sources... this is a book which deserves careful consideration." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"A thoughtful, closely reasoned, revisionist analysis of class as a viable definition of worker experience in Victorian and Edwardian England." Choice

"What other historians have done speculatively or on a rather limited front Joyce does on a grand scale, exploring the artifacts of northern plebian culture through detailed documentation and a wide variety of contexts: work, trade unions, speech, dialect, ballad, theater, and popular perceptions of history and the the British constitution....Joyce's work demonstrates overwhelmingly both that working people shared in a wider national culture and that many aspects of that wider culture were made by working people themselves and not artificially imposed from above....Patrick Joyce deserves our gratitude for forcing readers to take seriously evidence that is too often dismissed as merely marginal and picaresque.' Jose Harris, Journal of Modern History

From the Publisher