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Debating societies [ Clubs & Societies / Associational culture ]

… including women. Places > Clubs & Societies Practices > Associational culture Keywords Debate Politics Middle class Plebeian Public sphere Oratory Eloquence Debating societies were commercial ventures that provided the middling and lower … government suspected debating societies to be ‘Jacobin’ and as dangerous as the London Corresponding Society and other plebeian societies. There were indeed similarities and links, as some debating societies had distinctly radical, Paineite … Thelwall at Coachmakers’ Hall and John Gale Jones who founded the British Forum in 1804. However, the LCS and similar plebeian societies were definitely not debating societies. Though debating was plentiful in the LCS, it was not its prime …

Gentleman [ Taste & Manners / Politics & Society ]

… of land, of an estate. The word gentleman signified a high status that set a man apart from the lower orders, or plebeians.  However, from the late seventeenth century British society was slowly being transformed. The growth of a … work […] into money’. 1 This in turn created a new social grouping, the middling sort, which was neither patrician nor plebeian. The middling sort comprised some one million people in a population of seven million. Its ‘membership’ included …

West End of London [ Cities / Institutions ]

… print shops, coffee houses and brothels. The patent theatres in Drury Lane and Covent Garden were patrician but also plebeian spaces. The early modern West End became a place that shaped the public sphere through sites of discussion, … by the closure of theatres. 9 Yet Covent Garden (designed originally as a space for the elite) also produced a bustling plebeian culture based upon low life pleasures. Samuel Pepys saw his first Punch and Judy show there in 1662 (Gatrell …

Shoes [ Clothing & Fashion ]

… leather soles and uppers, or sometimes soles of wood. Shoes were expensive, so needed to last as long as possible: plebeian footwear often had hobnails or metal heelplates to stop them wearing out and to grip better on mud. The … that lefts and rights were identical – and a broad toe enabled them to be worn without constraining the foot. While plebeian footwear was not unaffected by fashion trends, to be ‘square toed’ was to be unfashionable when the elite …

Punch bowls [ Food & Drink ]

… ranks, including those in the middling and elite ranks who might be associated with wine and those in the lower and plebeian ranks who would drink beer. 1 1 . Karen Harvey, ‘Ritual encounters: punch parties and masculinity in the …

Street sociability [ Cities ]

… the incorporation of the ‘mob’ into the workings of the political nation up until 1780 and the Gordon Riots – created a plebeian veto on unpopular initiatives, that was again played out on the street between the rich, the middling sort and … Masculinities, 1660-1800 (London: Longman, 1999), p. 111-131. When Erasmus Jones published his Man of Manners: Or Plebeian Polished in 1737, for the ‘benefit of persons of mean birth and education’, his first order of business was to …