Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (hereafter London Labour) is a journalistic work that describes the living conditions of the working street-folk and the poor in mid-19th century London. Whilst creating vivid impressions of metropolitan street-life, the text also tries to arrange a part of the population unknown to the middle and upper classes into systematic order. Personal narratives alternate with numbers, tables and statistics. On an abstract level, there is a dichotomy between subjective and objective forms of representation, which makes it hard to pin down the text as either fact or fiction. Several critics take this dichotomy as a starting point to examine the status or relevance of London Labour as a historical document. …show more content…
Yet, right at the beginning of volume one, Mayhew states his ambition to subject the London street-folk to scientific classification: Those who obtain their living in the streets of the metropolis are a very large and varied class; indeed, the means resorted to in order ‘to pick up a crust’, as the people call it, in the public thoroughfares (and such in many instances it literally is,) are so multifarious that the mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce them to scientific order or classification. It would appear however, that the street-people may be all arranged under six distinct genera or kinds.(Mayhew, 1985, 5) From this paragraph we learn that Mayhew anticipates some of the problems that come along with his attempt to find a taxonomy of the poor population working in the streets. He admits that the group of interest is large and diversified, which makes it hard to comprehend it in all detail. He is aware of the fact that a systematisation is only possible by means of reduction, which inevitably means limitation and omission of certain characteristics. Yet, he postulates six “distinct” categories under which all of the London street-folk could be subsumed, without further commenting on the aforementioned problems. The paradox he thereby creates reveals also on the semantic level, where the antonyms “multifarious” or “varied” and “distinct” are used to refer to the very same group of
Lyddie’s working conditions in the factory are unsafe and dangerous. Even the factory building was unsafe. “... A girl had slipped on the icy staircase in the rush to dinner. ”(101) .The machines were very big and dangerous.
Though Lyddie does well in the factory, the working conditions there are deplorable. So when Lyddie’s friend, Diana Goss, begins to circulate a petition that argues for shortened hours, Lyddie has a difficult
The conditions were expressed very negative and unjust for they’d work for absolutely any wage. Men, women, boys, and girls, were put to work in harsh conditions that are treated as slaves doc 1. Living conditions are very alike to those depicted in doc 4 where immigrants were staying. They are very humble and they dress very cheaply and eat rice from China while sleeping 20 in a room treated very poorly. They used them to find success in business’s for they’d work continuously and would pay them whatever they wished.
Craft examines the usual roles of the Victorian men and women, passive women especially, requiring them to “suffer and be still”. The men of this time were higher up on the important ladder of that era. Craft believes the men are the “doers” or active ones in
This time period is usually associated with dreadful working conditions for the working class and unimaginable unemployment rates. The light that Griffin shines on the subject contradicts what many believe to be a terrible period for all those involved. We see a glimpse of this
Not only did their complaints raise wages and decrease working hours, they also eventually advanced medical care, increased literacy rates in the city, and made the city more sanitary. This resulted in healthier, happier people who lived longer and prospered. Not only did people become healthier, the children that they had were also healthier at birth, making it so parents didn’t need to have as many children in fear that some would die at a young age. Overall, Manchester vastly improved as a city throughout the 18th and 19th century; reforms were made, people became happier, and education spread throughout the city, but not before workers protested and died young because of their working and living conditions. The story of Manchester truly proves that in order to improved, you must first experience the lowest point; without the low point, you can never truly understand or experience
In Chapter 12 of Readings for Sociology, Garth Massey included and piece titled “The Code of the Streets,” written by Elijah Anderson. Anderson describes both a subculture and a counterculture found in inner-city neighborhoods in America. Anderson discusses “decent families,” and “street families,” he differentiates the two in in doing so he describes the so called “Code of the Streets.” This code is an exemplifies, norms, deviance, socialization, and the ideas of subcultures and countercultures.
One of the best-selling authors, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her narrative essay, “Serving in Florida,” describes her personal experience working in a local restaurant called Jerry’s. Ehrenreich’s purpose is to attach importance to the low-wage America workplace. Using rhetorical strategies such as negative diction, simile, images, and pathos, Ehrenreich attempts to raise public awareness of the low-wage workers’ life in her readers. Firstly, Barbara Ehrenreich exploits connotation of words and simile to emphasize the difficult life of the lower class.
Not only did he go to these tenements to write about them, he also took pictures of what was happening inside those tenements. In the tenements, lived very poor people, so even 5 dollars would be too much for them. While the rent was too high for these people, the wages were too low for the factory workers. “Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent.”
In chapter 15, “Self-Help in Hard Times”, Zinn’s overarching point is that unity among workers was not simple to achieve, and that white supremacy was a powerful, deadly force after the war. To support and further discuss these concepts, Zinn points out how relations between the American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World were often tense, how city life often changed drastically during times of strike, and how immigration laws during the twenties began to favor Anglo-Saxons. One such way Zinn showcases these ideas is by describing how drastically life changed for cities when workers went on strike, hoping for an increase in their wages. As the strike continued on throughout February of 1919, Zinn recalls how all services, except for those that were consider essential to daily life, ceased.
Hall in an article, Literary and Cultural Theory, “...methodologies emphasize issues gender, sexuality, and/or race,” (Hall 73). Hall describes that Marxism is the idea where “...society is stratified into three primary classes.- the Aristocracy, the Bourgeoisie, and the Proletariat…”(Hall 74). Each of these three social classes has a different view of everything and a different set of interests. In the novel, Brave New World, Huxley splits the society into five different groups, the Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas and the Epsilon’s, but are put into three categories. For example, The Aristocracy are the Alphas, the middle class or the Bourgeoisie are Betas, Deltas, Gammas and the poor workers or the are the Proletarians are mainly Epsilons.
The late 19th century consisted of rigid work hours for children, the growth of strikes, and the use of yellow journalism. It was a challenging time for anyone below the upper class to live in. This is demonstrated throughout Newsies, a Broadway Musical displaying the challenges from this time period. Child labor, a major part of the movie, was the way of life and consisted of young children doing hard work as a vital part of the nation’s economy and income of families of the time. Another part of the movie, strikes, were the people’s way of refusing to work as a result of not getting their desires.
Orwell begins his piece of writing with an extremely weak character that has been mocked and laughed at by the people of Burma. Orwell depicts his job situation in which he was “stuck”
Loss of work was an obvious struggle during the Great Depression and no doubt one the ‘Forgotten Man’ faced but the piece goes beyond surface. Man lost sense of community, motivation, and hope. The Depression may have caused citizens and the government to pull together in desperate need of support and comradery but that did not happen overnight. This piece shows a man, who is clearly not a hobo as he is dressed well and clean, being overlooked or as Dixon put it, forgotten. The frightful level of uncertainty the generation faced is unimaginable but they needed to remember they were not alone.
These categories are created to classify people conceptually based on achieved and ascribed characteristics. We hold onto these categories and base them on race, gender, age, and ethnicity. In the Help, we see Massey’s theory of Social Stratification at work. Everyone is the movie is placed at a different level in the social hierarchy that is based on their race, gender, age, or class. The white men are at the top, the white women fall right below the, then black men and the black women are placed at the lowest level of the hierarchy.