Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The social structure of the United Kingdom has historically been highly influenced by the concept of social class, which continues to affect British society today. [1] [2] British society, like its European neighbours and most societies in world history, was traditionally (before the Industrial Revolution) divided hierarchically within a system that involved the hereditary transmission of ...
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of the middle class in 19th-century Britain, the Victorian era. Victorian values emerged in all social classes and reached all facets of Victorian living.
The rise of the middle class during the era had a formative effect on its character; the historian Walter E. Houghton reflects that "once the middle class attained political as well as financial eminence, their social influence became decisive. The Victorian frame of mind is largely composed of their characteristic modes of thought and feeling".
The turn of the century saw the rise of popular journalism aimed at the lower middle class and tending to deemphasise highly detailed political and international news, which remain the focus of a handful of low-circulation prestige newspapers which reached a small elite.
The Victorian era saw a rapidly growing middle class who became an important cultural influence, to a significant extent replacing the aristocracy as British society's dominant class. [ 21 ] [ 22 ] A distinctive middle-class lifestyle developed that influenced what society valued as a whole.
British economic historian Gregory Clark has controversially claimed, in his book A Farewell to Alms, on the basis of extensive research, that Britain may have been where the Industrial Revolution began because the British people had a head start in "evolving" – through a combination of cultural and possibly even genetic changes – a critical mass of people with middle-class values.
Respectability politics have been criticized for being "used to rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence. Respectability politics is known as a philosophy coined by black elites to fulfill the race relations made within the negative stereotypes that have belonged to black people. In America this is another form of neo-liberalism."
Companies provided their employees with welfare services ranging from housing, schools and churches, to libraries, baths, and gymnasia. Middle-class reformers did their best to assist the working classes aspire to middle-class norms of 'respectability.' Frith's depiction of Paddington railway station in London