valuable overview of Victorian culture

books:


	• Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 F. M. L. Thompson Harvard University Press, 1990 - 382 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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valuable overview of Victorian culture

The Rise of Respectable Society is one of the best recent scholarly overviews of Victorian culture and society. Thompson argues persuasively that there was a unified value system-- the cult of respectablity-- to which the majority of both middle-class and working-class Victorians subscribed. This book is a good antidote to sensationalist accounts of Victorian England that focus exclusively on flamboyant high life or the shadowy underworld. It's a bit dry, but eminently readable.

Very Good

This is a very good survey of Victorian social history. Thompson adopts a thematic approach with chapters on Economy and Society (articulation and expansion of the working and middle classes), The Family (family structure and demography), Marriage, Childhood (a lot of information on education), Homes and Houses, Work (the emergence of a modern, disciplined work force, Play, and Authority and Society. Cumulatively the chapters give a good sense of the organization and character of Victorian life across its diverse populations. Each chapter is written very well. The potential weakness of a thematic approach is that it can obscure the character of change over time. Thompson does a very good job in each chapter of outlining the evolution of different facets of social experience across the many decades of the Victorian period. The emergence of a self-conscious working class with distinctive cultural features, the expansion and differentiation of the middle classes, the expansion of government, and the increasingly industrial and urban quality of life are depicted very well. There is also a lot of revealing detail in each chapter. Discussions, for example, of the nature of education, the effects of Poor Law revision, and the differences between different industries are very interesting.
Thompson's major theme, which he pronounces in the title and develops in most chapters, is the emergence of "respectable society." Thompson uses this term to mean more than the narrow, conventional sense of moral respectability. Respectability in Thompson's usage imples a certain amount of self-consciousness on the part of the emergent Victorian middle and working classes. Thompson's use of respectability includes also a sense that features of the working and middle classes came to be widely accepted by all Victorian social groups as these groups occupied increasingly important positions in British society. While Thompson doesn't discuss politics, the emergence of "respectability" parallels the increasing importance of the middle and working classes in political life in Britain.

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One of England's grand masters of history provides a clear and persuasive interpretation of the creation of "respectable society" in Victorian Britain. Integrating a vast amount of research previously hidden in obscure or academic journals, he covers not only the economy, social structure, and patterns of authority, but also marriage and the family, childhood, homes and houses, work and play.

By 1900 the structure of British society had become more orderly and well-defined than it had been in the 1830s and 1840s, but the result, Thompson shows, was fragmentation into a multiplicity of sections or classes with differing standards and notions of respectability. Each group operated its own social controls, based on what it considered acceptable or unacceptable conduct. This "internalized and diversified" respectability was not the cohesive force its middle-class and evangelical proponents had envisioned. The Victorian experience thus bequeathed structural problems, identity problems, and authority problems to the twentieth century, with which Britain is grappling.

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