“Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods

Abstract

The debate over the British labor aristocracy has been, since Eric Hobsbawm's “Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” a litmus test of changes in the political assumptions of successive cohorts of labor historians. Hobsbawm, writing as a Marxist in the cold war era, was (and remains) convinced that “membership” in this privileged stratum was mainly a question of wages, skill, and degree of unionization. In the 1970s, under New Left impetus, working-class culture more generally began to excite more interest; scholars began to look beyond the workplace for evidence of the kinds of divisions between workers—captured in the term respectability—which Hobsbawm pointed to in work-related spheres. Earlier concerns with occupational hierarchies, wages, and workplace associations have been supplemented by studies of friendly society membership, intermarriage between occupational groups, residential patterns, thrift, recreation, and so on.

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