Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800-1940

by Kidd, Alan; Nicholls, David

• ISBN13: 9780719056765
• ISBN10: 0719056764
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-08
• Publisher: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Summary

The essays in this volume deal chiefly with issues of class and gender, which are seen as mutually constitutive of social identity. Recent historical interest in the idea of "modernity" is represented in studies of socio-spatial relations of urban culture and in the emergence of gender-laden conceptions of the modern suburban culture of domesticity and consumerism. Art and art patronage are dissected as cultural motifs suggestive both of gender and rank. The detailed cultural aesthetic of the middle classes is explored from the learned societies of the late eighteenth century to the amateur operatic societies of the twentieth-century suburbs. A key focus is the changing and uncertain representation of masculine identities in relation to class.

Author Biography

Alan Kidd is Reader in History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

David Nicholls is Head of the Department of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Notes on contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xiii
Introduction: history, culture and the middle classes	1	(11)
Alan Kidd
David Nicholls
The public sphere, modernity and consumption: new perspectives on the history of the English middle class	12	(22)
Simon Gunn
PART ONE GENDER, IDENTITY AND CIVIC CULTURE
Prelude	31	(3)
`The Florence of the North'? The civic culture of Liverpool in the early nineteenth century	34	(13)
Arline Wilson
`A Christian and civilised land': the British middle class and the civilising mission, 1820-42	47	(18)
Alison Twells
Homosociality and middle-class identity in early Victorian patronage of the arts	65	(16)
Dianne Sachko Macleod
The bourgeois body: civic portraiture, public men and the appearance of class power in Manchester, 1838-50	81	(18)
Louise Purbrick
`Thoroughly embued with the spirit of ancient Greece': symbolism and space in Victorian civic culture	99	(13)
Kate Hill
The middle class, modernity and the provincial city: Manchester, c. 1840-80	112	(21)
Simon Gunn
PART TWO GENDER, IDENTITY AND CONSUMER CULTURE
Prelude	129	(4)
Middle-class `culture', law and gender identity: married women's property legislation in Scotland, c. 1850-1920	133	(13)
Craig Young
Mrs Pooter's purchase: lower-middle-class consumerism and the sales, 1870-1914	146	(18)
Christopher P. Hosgood
The English weakness? Gender, satire and `moral manliness' in the lower middle class, 1870-1920	164	(19)
A. James Hammerton
Gender, consumer culture and the middle-class male, 1918-39	183	(15)
Fill Greenfield
Sean O'Connell
Chris Reid
An outbreak of allodoxia? Operatic amateurs and middle-class musical taste between the wars	198	(15)
John Lowerson
Further reading	213	(6)
Index	219