Analysis Of Anna Clarke's The Making Of The English Working Class

To say that the government micromanaged the financial facets of the lower class society would be an understatement. They had certainly put their fingers into every pie of every aspect of the lower class’ life, at least the reformers certainly expressed their feelings of such a micromanaged oppression. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters discusses the Black Act in heavy detail. The Black act was initially a means of controlling hunting so that game was readily available for the Royals. The book illustrates the harsh punishment of death the bill entailed far for the small townsfolk surviving on agriculture around forests. Some of the additional crimes were public disorder, mismanaging criminal justice, and crimes or injury against property or people.

One of the best sources is Anna Clarke’s The Struggle for the Breeches which discusses both the experience and lack of historiography, particularly in E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. The plebian experience was very different, even from the middle class, and especially with the migration of so many people into cities because “plebian women and men worked together in crowded tenements, workshops and factories, socialized and traded on the street, and drank together in pubs,” while all other class levels had the men and women acting separately. With the move to cities discrimination in housing also became an immediate threat. Having children was looked down upon and resulted in having to live in extensively cramped impoverished neighborhoods or to “pay high rents to become householders and then let our rooms themselves” because lodging houses would not allow children. This lifestyle was likely a detriment to the poor opinion of the lower class as children and wives starved and where left at home while men explored their manhood through promiscuity, bars and clubs, and gambling. When women tried to form clubs for themselves, particularly “female factory workers to the isolation of London servants,” the government intervened with “the Friendly Society Act” in 1794 which “required registration of these clubs.” Both circumstances were significantly different than the gentry. The upper class was expected to present a “masculine private virtue and, by extension public reputation.” Despite blurred gender roles this was a sign of the government’s attempt at keeping social gender expectations as they were before the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it would not be until the end of the era, in the 1830s, when Factory Acts would be passed to better factory hours. The effort of these acts passing were credited to the male, not female, workers. The trend would