Moral change and the growth and establishment of respectability

Abstract

This thesis is focussed on the skilled artisan in London with the aim of explaining his apparent moral transformation in the period roughly from 1780 to 1850. The first chapter establishes what is meant by a working class code of respectability by giving examples of the kind of behaviour and attitudes that are most appropriate to it. This assesses some of the available explorations for the type of character structure that has become identified with an industrial working class culture.By referring to Place's evidence, the second chapter illustrates how the behaviour and values of the "average" artisons in the late eighteenth century were contextualised by a cultural milieu that was notorious for its turbulence and fatalism rather than restraint and rationalism. The aim is to show how this culture and its affirming values were dependent upon a social fluency that disintegrated in the nineteenth century. There is an examination of some of the ways in which respectability can be seen as a moral reflection of this disintegration. The third chapter focusses on how the Place evidence can demonstrate the interdependence of social and moral transformation. It shows how the changing life style of the artisan was confirmed in the moral prescriptions of the political organisations he approved and questions Place's implication that social segregation might be explained voluntaristically. The fourth chapter is devoted to Mayhew's study of the London trades in depth and shows the power of market factors at work in the process of social segregation and how they bore upon the defensive nature of respectability. In the fifth chapter a comparison is made of the evidence and ideas of Place and Mayhew drawing out the inter-relationships of the component dimensions of respectability, showing how they were related to social and economic change in London.