Rechercher

Debating societies [ Clubs & Societies / Associational culture ]

… including women. Places > Clubs & Societies Practices > Associational culture Mots-clés 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 …

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 …

Richard Steele [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… whom he accused of forgetting his Whig principles, and himself wrote against the government in a new periodical, The Plebeian , which was politically biting. In retaliation, the government removed him from his management of Drury Lane … exclusive. He was the voice of a bourgeois, or aspiring bourgeois, a world that (despite the title of his periodical The Plebeian which was primarily a signal of defiance against the controversial Peerage Bill which he saw as endangering the …

Taverns [ Food & Drink venues ]

… to be understood as a form of political gathering that sought to undermine the authority of the crown. As groups of plebeian and working class radicals such as the London Corresponding Society began to meet in alehouses to discuss the …