A. James Hammerton

Pooterism or partnership? Marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920.

I spent the evening quietly with Carrie, of whose company I never tire. We had a most pleasant chat about the letters on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ It has been no failure in our case. This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooters entry for 2 November in George Grossmiths famous satire, The Diary of a Nobody , serialized in Punch in 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husbands eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in the Daily Telegraph , avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. The Diary s readers are invited to relish the irony in Charless characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carries patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity. For over a century Charles Pooters transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of the Diary s readership, especially among upper-class personalities.

Ten‐pound poms revisited: Battlers’ tales and British migration to Australia, 1947‐1971

Migrants. ..will have a wide range of experiences to relate — many happy but some such as my own, not so happy. There would be many tales of hardship and incredible toil and travail to be told — and which need and HAVE to be told before these people die and their stories are lost forever.. .those stories that are outside the stream of success stories and satisfaction with having to come to live here — but I feel this is a story that has to be and MUST be told to show that life is not always a bed of roses. (Irene Y Kaukas to BBC, 28 October 1996)

‘Growing up in “white bread” England in the sixties I might as well have come from Mars’: Cosmopolitanism and the city in the lives of British migrants in the late twentieth century

A recurring theme in the testimony of British migrants to Australia in the two decades following World War Two, especially those from London and industrial cities, is the disappointment, often scorn, which they expressed for the quality of urban life in their new country. Amenities they had taken for granted, even in war damaged and austerity ravaged cities at home, seemed to be absent or inferior in Australian capital cities (as in the equivalent cities in Canada), and they prompted critical comments on issues ranging from the quality of public transport to restrictive liquor laws. Disappointment with the urban setting was one of the reasons why these migrants opted to settle in middle and outer suburbs. By the 1970s this critique began to give way to a more positive outlook among a younger generation, more intent on a search for ‘adventure’ and more cosmopolitan in inclination. For many of these migrants Australian cities represented a degree of excitement and challenge they had not known in the ‘white bread’ towns of their upbringing; by the 1990s the city centre living some of them chose was a celebration of a form of cosmopolitanism they had never experienced in Britain. The article draws on two oral history projects on post-war British migration to Australia, and one from Canada, to illuminate the changing meaning of the city in migrant life stories.

Book Review: A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England

1. Louise de Marillac founded the Daughters of Charity in 1633, a noncloistered order devoted to serving the poorest of the poor. 2. The prosecution of rapt reached a peak in the late 1660s (1668-1671) when it comprised 7 percent of all the criminal cases heard before the chief criminal chamber (Tournelle) of Parlement; thereafter it fell dramatically—coincident with the 1671 transfer of prosecutorial responsibility from the royal prosecutor to the plaintiff. The prosecution of infanticide or concealed pregnancy rose to some prominence in the 1640s (4.4 percent of the total criminal cases), peaked in the late 1680s and 1690s (8.1 percent), and then fell back to 1640 levels during the 1720s. An identical trend marked the prosecution of sexual offenses—concubinage, lasciviousness, and prostitution (mainly procuring) (pp. 102, 126, 136). 3. In the 1620s, the average annual number of criminal cases heard by the Tournelle and Vacations chambers of Parlement reached a period high of 137 per year; at the end of the century and early in the next, that figure had fallen sharply to between 29 (1687-1700) and 37 (1720-1726) cases per year (p. 136).

Review Essay : Forgotten People? Marriage and Masculine Identities in Britain

decade, under the stimulus of feminist ideas about gendered identities, historians have developed sophisticated readings of the many and varied &dquo;masculinities&dquo; adopted by men in changing historical contexts, from chivalric heroes and independent businessmen to &dquo;effeminate&dquo; and homosexual men. In Modern Britain alone, the site of the books under review, the range of masculinities now being explored confounds any surviving notion of an essentialist male identity. Cross-dressing, homosexuality, and the domesticated Chartist now vie for attention with more traditional patriarchal models.’ I