Other editions of book Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900

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.

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.

For the quality of its research and the clarity of its synthesis, The Rise of Respectable Society will gain a reputation as an outstanding reinterpretation of the Victorian period.In the years since the appearance of G. M. Youngs brilliant survey, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, a mass of new research from new perspectives has entirely changed the landscape of the Victorian era. The Rise of Respectable Society offers a new map of this territory as revealed by close empirical studies of marriage, the family, domestic and working classes from the rigidity of the class stereotypes by which they have been frequently portrayed. But it also argues that the diversity of cultures within those classes was in fact the essence of Victorian society, and that as each class developed its notions of self-respect, so it adhered ever more closely to the classes above and below it, thus avoiding the revolutionary fractures which appeared in many other European countries during this period.